Is age part of evolution?

[billvon]

If it's the society that is competing with other societies via Darwinian evolution, prosperity and technological superiority might easily overwhelm its foes' larger but sickly and uneducated populations.

And in Lamarckian terms . . . .

That, I think, is the problem with extending purely Darwinian evolution to societies. Societies DO evolve in a Lamarckian fashion, because they often carry traits forward via methods other than our genomes. (Laws are an obvious example.)

So once an organism develops the levels of intelligence, memory, society etc to be able to pass on memes without having to encode them in a genome, evolution of the society changes in a very fundamental way. Survival of the fittest doesn't really apply at a mall with handicapped parking spots and rental electric scooters.