How to Create Ideas that Evolve
Why do ideas spread?
By all rights, they shouldn’t. Ideas are valuable things. They can launch multi-billion dollar businesses, win wars and bring fame to those who possess them. Moreover, an elaborate legal infrastructure has evolved to protect them. Yet they not only spread, they often get better as they do.
Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to make the point that cultural evolution is very similar to biological evolution. If we want to know more about how ideas are created, disseminated, that’s as good a place as any to start.
Darwin’s Big Idea
Contrary to popular belief, evolution wasn’t Darwin’s idea. The concept was around long before he was. He did, however, propose a mechanism for how it all worked.
While evolution is still debated in some segments of society, there is little controversy about Darwin’s theory in the scientific community. Amazingly, it hasn’t been significantly altered in the 150 years since he published On the Origin of Species and there is very little biological research that can be done today without Darwin somewhere lurking in the background.
For any theory as important as Darwin’s, there are a variety of aspects and perspectives on the theory. For our purposes, we will focus on four primary elements:
Environmental Change: Geologists contemporary to Darwin had gathered evidence that the world was constantly changing, albeit too slow for us to notice through unaided observation. As the environment changes, different traits become favorable.
For example, the sickle cell trait can be great for hot and humid environments, because those who have it are resistant to malaria, but the same gene is disastrous at high altitudes, where those who have it become anemic, get headaches and can even die from exertion. Change the substrate, and you change the organism.
Superfecundity: Darwin had read a book by Thomas Malthus which pointed out that organisms reproduce faster than the resources that they need to survive. Therefore, not all of them can survive and there is inevitably competition between them for resources.
Variation: Different organisms have different attributes which can help them or hurt them in their struggle to live. This is one area of the theory that has been embellished over the years because the principles of genetics did not become well known until the early 20th century.
The two primary mechanisms for variation are mutation and genetic drift. Mutation has been demonstrated in laboratory experiments with quickly reproducing organisms such as bacteria and fruit flies. Genetic drift can be mathematically demonstrated and has been observed in split off societies such as the Pennsylvania Amish.
Replication: Successful traits are passed on through heredity. Again, Darwin didn’t know how this worked but even without detailed knowledge of genetics it was obvious that parents pass down traits to their children. Many scientists, including Dawkins, now see this point as perhaps the most essential.
In a nutshell, that’s the theory. Organisms naturally vary and as the environment changes, so does their chances for survival. Those that are successful propagate their traits (although some harmful traits inevitably piggyback on the successful ones).
Genes vs Memes
Darwin’s template readily adapts to the world of ideas. Clearly, there are many more ideas than ones worth noting and the survival of an idea is highly dependent of its context. A great idea is one whose time has come.
Darwin unwittingly illustrated this point in one of history’s great ironies. He paved the way for genetics, which was actually discovered by Gregor Mendel at about the same time that Darwin published On the Origin of Species. However, the idea didn’t catch on until decades later when natural selection became firmly established.
Variation also translates well into the conceptual sphere. Many ideas are modified and improved over time and completely new ideas inevitably spring up every now and then. Ideas can also combine with other ideas to form a powerful new concepts(which is also true in genetics).
However, what Dawkins emphasizes is the last point about replication. He points out that as soon as something valuable can be copied it will be. In Dawkins’ view genes are special because they are replicators.
Why Ideas Spread
Dawkins concept of replicators is much more powerful than it seems at first. To take the argument a bit further, the more powerful the replicator, the faster and more robust the evolutionary process will be. So it shouldn’t be surprising that information technology enables our ideas to spread wider and change faster than ever before.
Since the dawn of writing, ideas have been easier to replicate than organisms and ideas persist longer than individuals do. While we can’t faithfully leave behind our entire genomes intact, we can leave behind our ideas.
In some ways, memes are more powerful than genes. While celibacy is not a successful trait genetically, it has survived for centuries in the Catholic Church as a meme. Some ideas can attain immortality and actually grow stronger with time. Socrates’ ideas are arguably more important now than they were in his lifetime.
Our ideas are much bigger than we are, so it’s not surprising that we are powerless to contain them.
How to Drive the Evolution of Ideas
As I pointed out at the beginning, the dissemination of ideas is generally a good thing that we want more of. So it’s essential that we push the process as far and as fast as we can.
Here are three ways to do that:
Encourage Diversity: As Richard Florida points out, successfully creative places also tend to be more tolerant. Variation is a key driver of evolution.
Collaboration: Creativity theorists emphasize the importance of analogues in solving problems. Getting different people with varied experiences enlarges the total database of analogues put to work on any particular problem.
Strategic Flexibility: Much like the ecological world, the business world is always changing. An idea is only valuable as long as it fits its context. Being faithful to an idea rather than its purpose is more likely to kill the idea off than to ensure its survival.
A great idea is one that can evolve and adapt to a changing context. Diversity, collaboration and flexibility create the conditions for ideas to spread far and wide and become more valuable in the process.