There is no end to this march of human thought, as it transcends even death itself. The moment one node dies, many others will learn from the ideas of that node, and those thoughts form the foundation of further ideas to come. This is why the words of dead poets, politicians, and philosophers grow increasingly influential as time runs its course.

Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their

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The Evolution and Extinction of Ideas in Culture

The myth of a fully formed, genius-generated idea is debunked. Ideas emerge gradually, colliding and mutating along the way. While some ideas thrive for a time, they can eventually become extinct. Ideas replicate and change rapidly, creating a raucous environment. They infect and spread without concer

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