Nonhumanselect

Nonhumanselect is a term used to describe selection processes driven by nonhuman agents or forces. In biology, it refers to natural selection, wherein heritable variation among organisms interacts with environmental pressures to affect differential survival and reproduction, without direct human intention. The term can also cover selection mechanisms in non-biological domains in which outcomes are determined by nonhuman actors, such as autonomous systems or simulations that choose candidates for reproduction or continuation based on predefined criteria.

In biology, nonhumanselect operates through three core ingredients: variation, heritability, and differential fitness. Environmental factors such as predation, resource availability, climate, and disease impose selective pressures that favor certain traits. Over many generations, this leads to adaptation of populations to their environments. In computational fields, nonhuman-like selection occurs in evolutionary algorithms and other optimization methods where a program selects candidate solutions according to a fitness function, model, or stochastic rules, with no human step-by-step curation of each generation.

Relation to human-directed selection: nonhumanselect emphasizes the absence of deliberate human intent in the selection process, distinguishing it from artificial selection. However, humans commonly influence the conditions under which nonhuman selection occurs, for example by shaping environments or defining fitness criteria, which can blur the boundary between truly nonhuman selection and human-guided processes.

See also: Natural selection; Artificial selection; Evolution; Evolutionary computation.