Information and Energy
In "The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins' perspective is that genes and memes are units of information that act as though they can think in terms of their own best interests even though they cannot; a meme is a human-created unit of information that lives outside of our DNA. With genes and memes and their network topologies pooled as information, a simple two-parameter "information fighting information over energy" model explains many observations: DNA in different organisms fighting over energy in food; character sequences in books competing with those in other books over energy defined as readership time; and information in religions, languages and governments bundled into cultures fighting over energy loosely defined as oil or money. At each of these scales "energy" is a finite entity that information consumes to replicate, develop, and pump out entropy increases expected from the second law of thermodynamics.