on adaptation and evolution 
10 October 2009, 6:29am

why is it that we tend toward holding something so old as if it were sacred, rather than accepting its need for evolution and adaptation?

come senators, congressmen, please heed the call. don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall. for he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled. there's a battle outside raging. it'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, for the times, they are a-changin'.

why is it that we tend toward holding something so old as if it were sacred, rather than accepting its need for evolution and adaptation? more specifically, without putting too much emphasis on the vague, somewhat meaningless terms "liberal" and "conservative", why it is that so many liberals are intent on making the US return to its "founding documents" (the unrelated whitehouse article about obama's nobel peace prize acceptance speech, originally linked to by john gruber, who says bluntly "to any american who isn't happy about our president having won the nobel peace prize: there is something wrong with you"). from religion to government to art to music, people tend to hold on to the original as if it were somehow heavenly. from the way we dress to the music we listen to, i, too, find myself — though my mind is changing slowly — trying to make something new resemble the original, somehow more "pure" version of something, rather than adapting it to create something truly new.

adaptations and evolutions

as a simple example, consider music covers. there are a handful of great versions of someone performing someone else's song, though they are few and far between. look at all along the watchtower, originally by bob dylan. the song was originally a folk song, which jimi hendrix then took and adapted into his own style. the result was a pretty rocking song that barely even resembles the original. there's a reason i mention this song rather than, say, the times they are a changing by the same, then covered by simong and garfunkel, using an almost identical style (ironically, the song states clearly the need to evolve). when i listen to the cover, all i want to do is hear the original. but when i listen to the cover of watchtower, it's like they're two completely different songs, each one valuable in their own right.

consider, too, adaptations of books into movies. this is, perhaps, very similar to my previous example, but still worth noting. how many times have you heard before that a movie "isn't as good as the book"? (sure, i think a large number of people saying that only do so to sound more intellectual. something i've never really understood is that movies are, in some circles, entertainment only, while books make you more sophistocated. but i digress...) but a movie that has adapted itself to the current time, the director's vision, etc, makes it a completely different art form. though i hadn't intended to make this reference, consider the movie adaptation. by charlie kaufman and spike jonze. the movie is an adaptation from a book about orchids, but eventually becomes a movie about the adaptation itself. the final result aside, the protagonist struggles because he has a desire to "stay true" to the book, but in the end, is unable to, because he discovers the essence of the book is, in reality, far different from what he had expected.

swimming upstream

as a slightly heavier example, consider organized religion (more specifically, look at organized religions that have been around for at least a thousand years). by looking at several examples — daoism, christianity, bahai'i, judaism, buddhism — you can see a clear pattern in which the people in the organization, generally those in power, tend to complicate things by adding rules, details, or other aspects (likely to keep their power), after which the people, or at least a subset of them, attempt to return to their so-called roots, after acknowledging that they've lost their way in the years since. i remember first realizing this when studying daoism. i was particularly drawn to it because of its simplicity, and the awareness that everyone by nature will — and must — interpret it in their own way. i found the introspection beautiful, and the fundamental ideas were some that i felt richer after having meditated on for some time. then i read the chuang zi, a long text written by a man of the same name a few thousand years later. suddenly, the word "daoism" meant far more than finding one's own path; within it were thousands of strict rules, explicit and clear, as if following the rules would result in achieving some goal. i read the book a second time, and realized that daosim, over its several-thousand-year evolution, had left the simplicity i found so moving, and became a governing force which people could follow blindly.

apparently, many christians in the past have felt the same about their faith, stemming off from the then current path and creating branches, feeling born again after finding the roots they sought for so long. but, as far as i know, very few have successfully adapted into the current world. comparing the world now to that which existed 2000 years ago seems absurd when discussing things like women's rights, freedom or technology — why should the ideas of religion be so far different?

the advance of technology

analogous to this is the development of software or websites. (when contemplating sociological phenomena, i tend to compare to computers, as computers were built by humans using human logic to function as a high powered human brain, using simple algorithms recursively to solve far more complex problems.) writing software is a lot like building a house. you have an idea of what it'll look like, what features it needs to have, what problems it needs to solve, etc. then you plan as much as you can, or are willing. then you lay down the foundation. then the structure. then the specifics. then you've got your gold release. time passes and you find a few bugs, or you add a few more functions that weren't initially part of the plan, but could be built upon. and then years later, you realize that your original code is crap, and that you may as well start over instead of continuing to support it (eg peterdot into avalantern). you can take a bunch of the existing code, but maybe it's even better to just start over. from stratch. once again, consider what problems you want it to solve, what features you'd like it to have, etc. and you find that the software is written as it should have been (except maybe the recent activity page), and that it just fits. after all, you had no idea your users wanted to send messages when you first wrote the site, or leave comments, etc. but now you do.

note that the greatest advance in the mac operating system was when they went from OS 9 to OS X, which involved writing from the ground up. windows has never made such a change, which is why it still feels like a build on XP.

thomas jefferson is my homeboy

jefferson said that a revolution "at least every 20 years [is] a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." this guy, even when he was only 33 years old, in a world where a college degree contained the same information as one week of today's new york times, knew that governing bodies needed change, and to be rewritten, every so often. every twenty years, he thought! so why is it that people keep trying to return to the documents on which our government was founded, if our government was founded under the understanding that we need revolution? why are there still laws stating that i can have a dual with someone in massachusets as long as a governor is present? why are there so many laws that we need to pay people tons of money to find the cracks between this one and that? i'm not saying we need a revolution; i'm simply asking why, after we can see through so many examples of successes and failures pertaining to not learning and not adapting, do we still feel the need to return to our "founding documents"? and even scarier, why is it that so many so-called "liberals" are constantly criticising new laws and only suggesting returning to crazy old ones as a solution? can you believe that prohibition was actually an ammendment to our constitution?!

the world is changing. returning back and preaching the documents from 200+ years ago, when men had slaves and women weren't people yet, when people still believed in witches, or when it was okay to have a dual as long as a governor is present, is not going to solve our problems. so you'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone, because the times, they are a-changin'.