Erhard Glötzl 

The basic concern of the general theory of evolution is to understand the entire evolution from the origin of life to the biological, technological, social, and economic structures of the present from a unified point of view and structure.

The general theory of evolution can be seen as a comprehensive generalization and extension of Darwin's theory of evolution. It goes far beyond conventional extensions of Darwinian theory, such as synthetic evolutionary theory or multistage selection or evo-devo or epigenetics. Essentially, it views evolution from the perspective of the evolution of information. It expands the Darwinian terms of "biological species," "genotype," "phenotype," "mutation," and "selection" and replaces them with much more general terms. These conceptual extensions make it possible to describe evolutionary developments in quite different areas from a unified point of view and within a unified time frame.

The basic idea is to understand the evolution of everything as the emergence of new information types and new information technologies in the following sense:
- A new type of information is associated with the emergence of a new storage technology
- For each new type of information, 3 information technologies emerge one after the other:
Storage technology, Duplication technology, processing technology.

With this concept, the chronology of the entire evolution can be divided in a natural way into 7 ages with 3 sub-ages each, which correspond to the 7 information types with their corresponding 3 information technologies. Better and better information technologies are the basis for the fact that more and better targeted variation mechanisms could be formed. This explains the exponential increase in the speed of development and why development is probably heading for a singular point.

The following topics represent a selection of new ideas presented in detail in the paper:
- Evolutionary theory of information
- Link between the evolutionary theory of information and the general theory of evolution.
- Megatrends of evolution
- Evolution of the driving forces
- Targeted variation mechanisms as essential elements of evolution
- Constraints as essential elements of evolution
- The illusion of free will as an evolutionary trait of success
- The documentation of debt relationships (especially in the form of money) as a catalyst for win-win and cooperation mechanisms
- The difference between individual utility optimization and total utility maximization
- From Artificial Intelligence 1.0 to Artificial Intelligence 2.0