A long time ago, sev­eral careers ago indeed, a bunch of us grad­u­ate stu­dents nabbed the Depart­ment van and drove from Oxford to Colum­bus to see Stephen Jay Gould speak at Ohio State Uni­ver­sity. For those of you too young or unfor­tu­nate to have heard Gould speak: he was good. Not merely TED-​​talk good, but a man who spoke as he wrote: with paren­the­ses and ellipses and em-​​dashes, long big-​​bite cogent thoughts, paragraph-​​structured. And musical.

So imag­ine him. Imag­ine him alive or as a ghost, and in par­tic­u­lar speak­ing about the Myth of Progress. I don’t hon­estly recall whether he talked about the Myth of Progress when he was speak­ing in Colum­bus that night; it might have been about Cre­ation­ism (which was hot in those days) or some other irra­tional­ity. But today you and I, we’re going to chat a bit about the Myth of Progress, and I’m invok­ing Gould as its stal­wart foe.

That said, this isn’t going to be about how Sci­ence (done right) can help peo­ple think in the world. Indeed, it’s about how Sci­ence (as she is done) is fuck­ing up how peo­ple think. Includ­ing, I should empha­size, the major­ity of Sci­ence. And Engi­neer­ing. And more or less all pub­lic pol­icy there­from derived.

So as it exists in my head, the Myth of Progress lives some­where between being a folk heuris­tic, a bad habit of visu­al­iza­tion, and a for­mal­ized mis­un­der­stand­ing of how the bio­log­i­cal world actu­ally works. The Great Chain of Being is one facet: the notion, expanded and locked in since the Neo­pla­ton­ists, that the world is orga­nized along a lovely axis lead­ing (in some sta­tic sense) from imper­fectly prim­i­tive on up to per­fect and holy. The March of Progress illus­tra­tion you’ve seen par­o­died in so many adver­tise­ments is another facet: the gam­bol­ing mon­key, the crouch­ing ape, the slumped cave man, the dude strid­ing pur­pose­fully ahead, and so on. And so on.

Now Stephen Jay Gould, he wrote a lot on the sub­ject of the Myth of Progress. I am not him, and heaven for­fend I tread even near his emi­nent foot­steps, so I am going to sum­ma­rize what he said on the Myth of Progress for my own pur­poses here: It is not just bull­shit, it’s dan­ger­ous bullshit.

Evo­lu­tion doesn’t col­lapse down into a lin­ear any­thing, and it’s not just wrong but mis­lead­ing to take the branch­ing net­work of descent and cross-​​breeding and abuse it that way. Evo­lu­tion doesn’t pro­ceed by dis­crete steps, and it’s not only wrong but mis­lead­ing to imply that species replace one another. Evo­lu­tion doesn’t even pro­ceed when you get right down from it. It is always hap­pen­ing, every­where, all over: all the things that ever hap­pen among organ­isms and their envi­ron­ments are in a real sense “evo­lu­tion going on”.

There are sub­tleties in this, of course. A lot of the more insid­i­ous ones even biol­o­gists fall prey to. There’s the ten­dency towards call­ing bac­te­ria “prim­i­tive” because they were first. And don’t get me started on the swarm of philo­soph­i­cal traps that com­prise the ill-​​formed notions of begin­nings and end­ings, births and extinc­tions, even the nature and def­i­n­i­tions of “indi­vid­u­als” and “species”. Some day when we’ve both got more time, we’ll do a bunch of oner­ous myth­bust­ing on these themes.

Maybe. Who knows? But this morn­ing I’m here to talk about writing.

Ah, tra­di­tion. You start with an idea or two, and maybe you out­line or you blast out a tex­tual draft, and then maybe you print it or you step away and come back to the top of the file, and work through it all, and maybe restruc­ture it, and then there’s this phase where you see incon­sis­ten­cies on a num­ber of scales or notice short­com­ings in ref­er­ences or links or illus­tra­tions, and you con­verge and you refine and you stay up late and then you’re done.

You write a lit­tle gam­bol­ing mon­key of a draft, and you work your way up to the cocky dude with a spear on his shoul­der. You slap him into an email attach­ment or a manila enve­lope, drop a cover let­ter on him, and off he goes, done. In the Record. Your baby.

Your prop­erty, among other things. Your rep­u­ta­tion, your name, your ideas or at least your re-​​presentation of care­fully acknowl­edged other people’s ideas.

OK, maybe it’s not that sim­ple. Maybe you’ll get it back with some sug­gested cor­rec­tions, and you’ll do a cou­ple of fur­ther steps of the dance to move it to a more advanced state, and then that’s what’s done. Or maybe you real­ize later than is typ­i­cal that there’s a dif­fer­ent qual­i­ta­tive struc­ture of your writ­ten thing called for, per­haps some­thing that became appar­ent only after you’d mostly-​​completed an ear­lier ver­sion, and you revise, but then the refine­ment process starts again and… well, done is done.

You own that done thing. If you’re col­lab­o­rat­ing, maybe all of you own it. But it’s owned, right?

Now, some Unthink­able Things:

1. You return to an ear­lier ver­sion of a writ­ten work in progress, and start refin­ing that—without aban­don­ing the other branch. In other words, you take a “writ­ten work” two dif­fer­ent direc­tions at once.
2. You keep chang­ing a work after it has been deliv­ered with­out explic­itly indi­cat­ing that it has been changed.
3. Some­body else takes an ear­lier (pri­vate) ver­sion of your work, and revises that in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion, with­out sup­plant­ing or replac­ing your com­pletely per­sonal one.
4. You don’t give credit to other people’s ideas that appear in your work. No links, no cita­tions, not even any block quotes.
5. Some­body else builds on a “final” ver­sion of your work, and doesn’t explic­itly acknowl­edge your contribution.

Bad, bad stuff. Icky squicky stuff for writ­ers and sci­en­tists and pho­tog­ra­phers and more or less any­body in the Life of the Mind.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

Stuff hap­pens, doesn’t it? All of them hap­pen. Stu­dents of course do this stuff, mere prim­i­tive Stu­dents who have not yet been cor­rected. And insid­i­ous scoundrels, who have not yet been brought to jus­tice. Oh, and the absent-​​minded some­times will do some of those, espe­cially the ones where they for­get to give credit where due. And there’s uncon­scious pla­gia­rism of course, and self-​​plagiarism, and there are some rit­u­al­ized ways one can (for exam­ple) take a prior work and bun­dle it up in a new work by expan­sion or repurposing.

So those happen.

And then there’s this odd thing about the Pub­lic Domain: It per­mits all those things. You could put zom­bies in Pride and Prej­u­dice if you wanted, with­out men­tion­ing the lady who wrote it, but it might not be as widely read with­out the invo­ca­tion of her rep­u­ta­tion. If instead you took an obscure magazine-​​serialized anti-​​Catholic novel of the 1850s and set it in space, and nobody had ever seen it besides maybe ever-​​watchful Miriam Burstein… but it might [well] end up being a bet­ter book.

That’s just to speak of inten­tion. There’s also just noise, isn’t there? What is “done”? You write until the writ­ing is done, but you don’t count type­set­ting: there are a dozen other peo­ple some­times between you ship­ping off your “fin­ished” dude with his spear and the dis­counted book on the remain­der shelf at the side of the book store. There are copy edi­tors (hope­fully), and copy-​​and-​​paste errors, and type­set­ting, and print­ing and impo­si­tion… all sorts of vari­a­tion can crop up from “the system”.

And a librar­ian or a book­seller or an Infor­ma­tion Sci­en­tist or maybe even just that rare Eng­lish stu­dent who pays atten­tion will spend as long as you like speak­ing on the sub­ject of “ver­sions” and “works” and “edi­tions” and “variants”.

So, then. What is a book or a paper or a blog post or an inven­tion, that a species is not? You can­not make the argu­ment that a species is “real” where a work is not, because of course the notion of species is just as fraught. Which is why Stephen Jay Gould is in the room, his ghost watch­ing and grin­ning (I hope), ready to jump in with a long well-​​formed sen­tence to remind you: None of these things is a thing. They can be use­ful. They can help us do work, and tell bet­ter sto­ries about the world. But “species” has a his­tory, and has bad edges; “indi­vid­ual” and “descent” even have bad edges, when you get right down to mater­nal effects on devel­op­ment and microflora and epi­ge­net­ics and all that other stuff that’s use­ful in speak­ing of excep­tions in biology.

Those excep­tions are evi­dent to any advanced prac­ti­tioner. They leave the biol­o­gist a choice: to either steer well clear of prob­lem­atic areas, or to jab a fin­ger down inside to see what happens.

jab

In soft­ware we have the begin­ning of a very dif­fer­ent notion of the bounds of things. There is col­lab­o­ra­tion, there are anas­to­moses in the “tree” of soft­ware, and a grow­ing cul­tural norm that reuse and reusabil­ity are not only per­mit­ted but rewarded. There are licenses, and there are rep­u­ta­tions and liveli­hoods made by shar­ing. Great Minds of our day, like Clay Shirky and Steve John­son, they’re pok­ing at these very holes in the con­text of prop­erty, progress, own­er­ship and col­lab­o­ra­tion. The law and the Inter­net, the social and the academic.

Me, I’m no Great Mind. I’ve got a monot­o­nous bor­ing old thing I always always do: I ask why? You might be tempted to spank a five-​​year-​​old who plays too often with the iter­ated “Why?” In my case… well, con­sider that astute obser­va­tion of George Bernard Shaw’s before you try that approach.

What might hap­pen if you let one of those Unthink­able Things hap­pen? Just let it go. What might happen?

Why?

I don’t know. That’s why I ask. But there’s one thing I learned a long time ago about life in the world: Even­tu­ally every­thing hap­pens. There is a niche, a con­text, a way of life in every approach.