Cirrus@Austlit

'Let's begin with the observation that evolution and culture exhibit a common pattern: descent with modification. The analogies have been made before. T.S. Eliot conceived the poetic tradition as an organism, a 'living whole' passed on and changed as each generation reads the poets who came before. Transmission is at once the technique of recurrence and the process of change. The miraculous variety of life on Earth has been created over millions of years by a still-mysterious cellular urge to replicate, repeated in organisms, generation after generation. Homer's replicated epithets enabled the transmission of The Odyssey over centuries. A circle of children reciting a growing list of items they went to the shop to buy or singing nursery rhymes hone these skills. Transmission, however, is more than mere duplication. Reproducing proteins are an engine of evolutionary transmission, but transmission also requires creativity.' (Publication abstract)