The implications, it seems, ought to be considered by philosophers and humanists as well as social scientists. The first requirement is an entity that is capable of replicating itself. Put it in an environment where it is able to replicate itself, and soon you have a lot of copies. Some copies are better suited to the environment than others. Natural selection takes over, and evolution is off and running.
Evolution is random.
Beyond the simple principle outlined above there is no purpose, no direction, no inherent system or order. All the enormous variety of our planetary flora and fauna can be explained on the basis of individual biological entities getting a jump on the competition through small variations that gave them a competitive advantage in the particular environment they inhabited. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins pointed out that there is a replicating thing that exists only in the realm of ideas. Memes start in an individual human mind and pass on through replication into other minds, where they join with other memes while competing for space in the finite universe in which they exist. In short, memes replicate, compete, and survive or die, all in the space provided by human thought and records.