Jan Kulveit
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They mutate.
They have differential fitness.
They're heritable enough to be stable.
There's an image here.
My go-to example is black forest cake.
There are many variants.
What makes some fitter than others?
Some taste better.
Some use local ingredients.
Some are easier to transmit.
Maybe now, in the Instagram era, cakes that photograph well spread better.
The transmission landscape changes and different variants win.
There's an image here in the text.
But there are constraints we don't usually notice because we've never seen alternatives.
No cake recipes are millions of words long.
Too hard to transmit.
No cake recipes are written in quantum field theory formalism.
No cake recipes result in the cook dying.
We take this for granted.
Ideas have always transmitted on human substrate.