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 concern for us.

Transcript:

Speaker 1

Along the way, the myth developed. That a good idea is all we need. That a good idea comes fully formed out of someone's head, out of an organization. And that's it. Because when we look back at history, we say, oh yeah, a genius thought that one up. But that's not actually what happens. What actually happens is an idea comes into a tiny portion of the world. And maybe it collides with another idea. And maybe it replicates. And maybe it mutates along the way. And that idea, that idea might be perfect for its time, like the newspaper was in 1904. But over time, that idea might become extinct. In our culture, the idea can thrive for a while, but it continues to replicate. It continues to change the culture and may end up making itself extinct. But along the way, that idea replicated and mutated and became something completely unrecognizable to the person who originally put it in. So when we think about how fast ideas replicate, how much more quickly they are ricocheting around our culture, how much more mutation goes on. When person A sees it and hands it to person B, who changes it and in person C times a million, and then times a million again. Is it any wonder that our environment is so raucous? What we've done is built an incredibly fertile ground for ideas to replicate and spread. And many of them go extinct along the way, and the ideas don't really care about us. They're just replicating, infecting us and then spreading again.

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