The creation myth

It has long been understood that acts of creation and ensuing innovation come only from divine inspiration — products of distant genius unattainable by the common man. We herald those who create in marvel of their godlike wonder. Their creations serve them.

This outside-in approach to creation is egoic at best.

The truth is, no one creates in a vacuum. We are constantly immersed in influence. The most heralded and prolific creators in history, both distant and recent, understand this fact the best.

And they embrace it.

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense. — Henry Ford

Last universal common ancestor

All present life on Earth descends from one single-celled orgasm that lived 3.5 billion years ago — the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).

Think about that for a moment. All living things share this single common genetic heritage. Plants and animals. Humans and sea anemones. Bees and snow leopards.

Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. — Charles Darwin

As LUCA copied itself as a form of reproduction, it mutated.

Reproductions with mutations or transformations that increased its chances of survival benefited the organism — some of which adopted sexual reproduction, living on tocombine their transformed genes with other favorably mutated descendants.

Through this iterative pattern, LUCA evolved into every living species on the planet.

Ideas evolve in the same way.

Origin of the meme

All present ideas on Earth descend from one universal ideal that transcends humanity — the last universal common meme (LUCM).

Genes are a unit of inheritance and a part of cells, the smallest unit of life. Memes can be thought of as the smallest unit of ideas — and, contrary to popular belief, not silly cat pictures.

The study of memes (memetics) postulates that ideas evolve through memes in the same way as organisms evolve through genes — copying, transforming, and combining with other memes to produce the vast array of ideas that filter through our society and culture.