19 June 2011 - meme fitness

The meme fitness landscape is strongly epistatic, which means (if you don’t mind a little jargon) that what you already believe affects what you may believe next. Really it’s more than that: Learning is Procrustean and cuts alien ideas like a restriction enzyme until they fit. As a result, each individual belief is a unique mutant, and the cladistic methodology that seems so intuitively appealing as long as you avoid the word “synapomorphy” loses its firm foundation. For example, I believe that everything is deeply related, so complicated mixed metaphors add clarity.