Lewontin’s Conditions for Natural Selection

Lewontin’s conditions (also known as Lewontin’s recipe) are a formulation of the three minimal, necessary, and sufficient requirements for a population of entities to undergo evolution by natural selection. Outlined by evolutionary biologist Richard C. Lewontin, these principles provide an abstract and universally applicable framework for Darwinian evolution, stripping the process down to its logical core.The framework is a foundational concept in modern evolutionary theory because its generality allows it to be applied to any system where entities vary, reproduce, and inherit traits—including cultural, computational, and immunological systems.

The Three Conditions

In his seminal 1970 paper “The Units of Selection,”