Evolution Everywhere
1) Evolution of species by natural selection is the classic of the genre, of course. If you have a bunch of finches trying to drink nectar out of flowers, the finches with the long pointy beaks can more easily get deep in those nectaries, and over time the finch population becomes dominated by the long of beak.
2) I think some of my more anti-capitalist friends are flabbergasted at the idea that the invisible hand could possibly guide businesses to figure out what customers want. If you've ever been inside a business, that doesn't seem to be how it works! But that's not the theory of capitalism, really: it's that if a bunch of different businesses try to please customers, even if they're all wildly flailing around at random, the ones that happen to figure out What People Want will stay in business, and the ones that don't will die out.
3) What we post online in any algorithmic environment is subject to brutal evolutionary pressures. Even here on my relatively insulated blog, it's hard to ignore the incentive to write what people seem to enjoy. E.g. you guys love lists, empirically, and all my most popular posts in the last few months started with a number, so here I am writing another list. But this effect is 1000000x fold on a platform like Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, where your most popular offerings can get 1000000x the attention. Soon you find yourself desperately iterating towards whatever the algorithm most rewards from you, until one day you wake up and you're posting bulls**t rage-bait because your audience applauds when you do.
4) What I don't think is nearly as heavily acknowledged is that the same pressure exists in our non-algorithmic environments, like our everyday lives. Every time you say an opinion at a party you get feedback based on other people's responses; without even necessarily knowing it consciously, you get trained that some opinions are far more popular than others; unless you really make huge and deliberate efforts, the natural glide-path is towards only saying the views that get you good responses. It's like social media just without the quantification, and with real people whose feelings about you matter immensely, and who are more likely to be selection-biased to have similar views to each other versus the diversity of the internet as a whole. I sometimes wonder if the only progress in society is made by disagreeable people who are able to withstand the crushing social pressure to only say (and think) already locally-popular things.
5) At least in Europe, professional sports leagues are evolutionary: the teams at the bottom of the league get demoted, the teams at the top (of the league below) get promoted in their place. American sports somehow don't function this way, they're like a managed zoo where the animals are insulated from evolutionary pressures, I am pretty confused about it.
6) Corporate politics is all about evolution. The most successful managers sneak more and more of their proteges into the firm, the least successful managers get booted from the firm and don't get to hire any more people in, and can't protect the people they hired in previously. Fitness is determined by your fitness at playing the game, not at how good you are at [thing the organization was supposedly set up to do].
7) Political parties get formed by evolution: the ones whose platforms are unpopular wither away, the ones whose platforms are popular live to fight another election. And this is true fractally for coalitions within each party, and politicians within each coalition. The upshot is that, over time, parties can evolve beyond recognition as they seek to respond to the changing environment and survive within it. And as always with evolution, this doesn't necessarily mean the actors are manipulative or even conscious of what they're doing: it could be that 100% of politicians are 100% sincere in their beliefs, but over time the politicians with unpopular beliefs will get selected out of the party, until the only people left are the ones who hold the views that the majority of the selectorate endorses. Survival of the fittest, where "fitness" doesn't mean "good" but just "good at surviving."