> I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem.
I'm definitely not claiming that evolution doesn't occur, but that the temporary supply of capital that VCs (and similar sources) supply creates an artificial environment that creates distorted evolutionary pressures. When the VC money runs out, and technologies are "returned to a natural ecosystem", the end result is often not that the VC funded tech was the fittest in the market. Meanwhile, if a particular technology consumed the market by distorting its fitness function and eliminates otherwise healthy competitors along the way, the VC backed tech might survive in the end, but it's not clear that it would be the fittest given natural market forces. However, everybody else is dead.
To really stretch this analogy, it's a bit like an environment with several predatory cat species - each good at a particular strategy. One day a team of hunters comes in, kills all the prey, and selects a specific cat species as "the champion" and simply feeds it in captivity. Once the rest of the cat species die off, they release the champion into the wild where lack of competition stalls its own further evolution. What cat would have been the "best" in the given ecosystem? Nobody knows.
There's a few interesting cases around this. Palantir comes to mind as a particularly useful case. They entered a market with a dozen competitors all surviving in the market, flooded it with something like 13 or 14 rounds of fundraising's worth of product, nearly annihilated everybody else in the market and when finally released to the wild, found that their signature product line was no longer what the market wanted at the size of the market the VCs had assumed. Today the company more or less acts as a bespoke web application company. Mimic competitors like C3.ai are also suffering under similar fates.
For a government funded use-case look no further than the space launch market. For decades it was funded by dumb government money and regulations that gave the appearance of a competitive market but was intended more to ensure strategic options. Those companies evolved/optimized to capture this steady supply of crippled prey money but it really created a bunch of sick, inbred, organizations. SpaceX appears, acts like a hungry wild tiger in a room full of Pugs and proceeds to dismantle them all, while building new markets and capturing the easy prey dripping out of the government funnel. There's no magic physics to SpaceX, all of the competencies existed in the industrial pipeline, but the government funding mechanism evolved them in unnatural ways. SpaceX, being heavily government funded, may yet evolve into one of those, but for the moment it's the difference between a Wolf and a domesticated small apartment dog.