Tradition is Smarter Than You Are

The thing we call culture is always an aggregation of individual human behaviors, and if taste were the mere product of random idiosyncrasies and irrational psychologies, culture would display no patterns, only noise. The fact that preferences in these disparate fields follow a similar rhythm of change suggests there must be universal principles of

There’s a theory in evolutionary biology called Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. It’s the idea that variance equals strength, because the more diverse a population is, the more chances it has to come up with new traits that can be selected for. No one can know what traits will be useful; that’s not how evolution works. But if you

Traditions are often time-tested best practices for doing something.

underlying mechanism: that a microscopic chemical recipe produces variation within and between species. Several decades after his death, however, the field of evolutionary biology became shaped by an idea called the modern synthesis. It’s a simple but powerful model that is useful for understanding social and cultural change within humans as well a