Genes Have Harnessed Physics to Help Grow Living Things

> Thompson wrote the book as an antidote to what he thought was an excessive tendency to explain everything in terms of Darwinian natural selection. His thesis — that physics, too, shapes us — is coming back into vogue.

Evolution by natural selection doesn't happen in a vacuum. Physics is part of the environment, and I would lump physics into the category of environment and hence an input to natural selection.

Natural selection is the process by which organisms are better adapted to their environment and produce offspring and is the main mechanism of evolution.

The other mechanisms are mutation, gene flow, genetic drift, and sexual selection.