The First Law of the Universe is the generalization of the concept of evolution to its broadest sense, and applies not just to the passing on of genes, but everything in existence, from rocks to trees to people in organizations, to organizations themselves, the societies they live in, and the ideas and culture of those societies. It is the first perspective through which one should view any system, if seeking to understand it.
The First Law of the Universe: Systems that best maximize their future presence will displace those that don’t in the long run.
The First Law is why we measure GDP and not Gross National Happiness: the country (or economic system) that grows the fastest will, one way or another, in the long run, displace the ones that grow slower. Growing faster may involve happy people or it may not, the First Law of the Universe doesn’t care: those systems that maximize growth will displace those maximizing happiness. We happen to live in a time when the two coincide: human happiness is part of a winning growth strategy (if you are fortunate enough to live in an advanced economy at least). This has not been true for most of human civilization, and it’s unlikely to be true again in the future when our own technological creations advance past us. We should be grateful to live in such a time!
The First Law is useful if you want to predict how actors in any system will behave over the long run. You just need to imagine what behaviors would maximize their future presence in that system; these will be the behaviors you are likely to observe if you look closely enough, although they will likely be masked.
If you accept the law as true, it leads to some surprising conclusions, the first of which is that the most effective process at spreading itself will eventually consume the entire universe, if given enough time. This seems plausible, in the same way that life on earth has slowly been consuming more and more of earth.
Also, that one organism of the earth life-process itself will come to dominate and control all others. And that the civilization, at some point in the future, will be dominated by one system.
The caveat to this law is right there in the definition: in the long run. Like the limit of a mathematical series, something that is eventually true can, in practice, mean “soon-ish”, or “basically never”. The domination of earth by a single process, for example, has taken 4 billion years, and is not yet over.
On the other hand, nothing stands long in the face of exponential growth. If you extrapolate the current growth rate of human civilization, for instance, at a conservative 2% annual rate (it’s currently ~4% and has been accelerating over the last 1,000 years, for context), in 1,500 years we will be consuming the entire energy output of the sun. And in another thousand years, 2,500 years from now, in the same time that separates us from ancient Greece, civilization will be consuming the entire energy output of the Milky Way galaxy. So “in the long run” may not be that long at all. It’s just a question of where the kinks in the s-curve are.
Additional exceptions to this law exist when a successful meta-process enforces rules that enable a stable competitive equilibrium in a sub-process — like a nation state enforcing antitrust law in business. Or cells inside an animal, sub-processes that have been domesticated for a meta-process. Cancer, then, being an instance of the meta-process failing to properly regulate the sub-process.
It helps to keep the First Law in mind when trying to improve society — no matter how well-intentioned your efforts are, if you ignore this law you’re unlikely to have any lasting impact. To effect sustaining, long-term change you must respect, if not embrace, the First Law of the universe, or whatever you accomplish will be displaced by something that does.