Ambient and related music has had such a special place in my heart… it’s provided a canvas for thinking and exploring ideas, on a personal level yes, but also in the abstract. Big Thoughts is my attempt to contribute a little bit to that world—context not required, but available below (be advised I am not a writer): #musings on cultural evolution and the RNA world One of the biggest open questions in biology is the origin of life— how the chemistry of inorganic and organic compounds organized into individuals, cells. Cells are subject to conventional darwinian dynamics, ‘survival of the fittest’, and in the last 4 billion years there’s a rich story filled with unexpected twists and turns that ultimately favored symbiosis and multicellular collaboration to create the extremely dynamic and entropic world we live in today. All that ‘complexity’ If you extrapolate backwards from cells, to what existed before, our darwinian intuition fails us— but there are many compelling theories as to what that pre cellular world could have looked like.. and curiously I think the internet can provide a powerful intuition into what that world may have looked like All life as we know it (excluding many viruses) contain DNA, which is more or less a book containing the instructions to do everything. Cells in your body read different parts of that book to fulfill their specialized role, be it a neuron, liver cell, skin cell, etc. Every cell has it’s own narrative where it goes to school, takes different classes, meets different people, and ultimately ends up in a particular role within its cellular society. At the start of a cell’s life it’s hard to predict where it will end up.. it is very much dependent on its ever changing environment as you develop into a person The central dogma of biology is that DNA is a book that codes RNA, which in turn makes proteins that do all the work and functions a cell might do. When thinking about life before cells, before individuals, there is instead a sea of information flowing freely without the constraints of ego. One formulation of this idea is the RNA world, where RNA acts as the book of information and can also fold in particular shapes that allow it to behave like proteins— performing functions, chemistry. Today, in the age of information, I think our intuition with respect to the internet can give us insight into what an RNA world might have looked like.. In biology information is measured in terms of genes— parts of DNA that code for proteins that do particular things. Parents pass a mix of their genes on to offspring, with mutations and modifications that are subject to new selection pressures. This vertical transmission occurs on the order of generations. Bacteria on the other hand are able to pass genes horizontally, even across species. They can trade information on how to metabolize different compounds, how to evade antibiotics— all on the fly. That’s like me passing a friend my eye color, or genes that can prevent or cure disease in a matter of minutes. This isn’t too different from how many of us experience cultural information.. we can read an idea that someone else has, form an opinion, or not.. but we can trade ideas of styles of clothing and music all in a heartbeat. I can change my clothes and what I listen to tomorrow, and again the next day. In unrelenting forums like 4chan, there is a machine of diversifying opinions/jokes/content that diversifies freely until it fits into some kind of bin defined by consensus where ideas or groups of ideas can be classically selected on… that is to say where they can exist in a place where you agree or disagree and behave accordingly… in a darwinian fashion. Before a label like ‘chillwave’ links geographically isolated artists, it’s hard to have an overarching darwinian opinion about whether you like it or not. The tendency to stereotype or create bins is a simplification that allows a more classic darwinian process to happen.. before that, you often just have a sea of people expressing different things with few constraints— the audience and intent may or may not be part of the idea. It’s complex, non-linear, hard to follow… It’s not truly random, but on par with how we think about diversification filling any space that energy allows. On the off chance that a new selection pressure comes in, it’s a good idea to have as many different configurations available in the off chance something has a benefit to survival (of the individual, idea, or population). Maybe I’ll stop here— curious about what you think of this, now my ideas too are subject to more classical darwinian selection