Metaheuristics involve information extraction and utilization processes to generate more promising solutions. However, the background of excessive metaphor has led to ambiguity in the computational process. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel evolutionary algorithm called alpha evolution (AE). It updates the solution using the alpha operator with the adaptive base vector and the random and adaptive step sizes. First, sample candidate solutions to construct the evolution matrix. Estimate the population state through diagonal or weighted operations of the evolution matrix. To enhance the correlation of estimates for each generation, two evolution paths accumulate the estimate results and achieve the base vector adaptation. Second, the composite differential operation constructs the adaptive step size to estimate the problem gradient, which is used to accelerate the convergence of AE. Finally, the attenuation factor alpha adaptively adjusts the random step size generated based on search space to balance exploration and exploitation. AE was comprehensively verified regarding its search bias, invariance, scalability, parameter sensitivity, search behavior, qualitative indicators, exploration and exploitation, convergence, statistics, and complexity. In numerical simulation, AE was compared with 106 algorithms on the CEC’17 benchmark announced at the 2017 congress on evolutionary computation (CEC). Furthermore, AE was applied to solve multiple sequence alignment and engineering design problems. The evidence shows that AE is competitive in exploration and exploitation, convergence speed and accuracy, avoiding local optima, applicability, and reliability. The source code of AE is publicly available at https://github.com/tsingke/AlphaEvolution.