There is an abstract account of natural selection (Lewontin 1970) where one observes that any population of entities, whatever they may be, will evolve through natural selection if (1) there is variation, that (2) affects reproductive success, and (3) is heritable.

I don’t know how I missed this before, but it recently occurred to me that there must be a similarly abstract account of drift, where a population will evolve through drift if there is (1) variation, (2) that is heritable, and (3) sampling due to finite population size.

Drift may not be negligible, especially since at a higher level of organization, the population size should be smaller, making natural selection relatively less efficient.