"Metapatterns" Volk reading notes

• Metapatterns can serve as an approach to creative learning (culture, biology, mental).
• People need to discover the diverse forms that metapatterns reveal themselves in, particularly social structures.
  
• Evolution is a pattern-finding process (spatially and temporally).
  
• The algorithm of evolution: replication, variation, selection.
• Replication: mitotic division of single cells.
  
• Variation: occurs in the process of replication (out of pure possibility and entropy).
  
• Selection: a test to see which patterns survive well enough to carry on.
  
• Cultural evolution embodies the same elements of the algorithm, but are not as certain as far as causes go.
  
• Many aspects of culture are the subjects of this algorithm: cars, food, education, careers, ideas, words, etc get replicated.
  
• These are all subject to variation too (cover albums, art inspiration etc, )
• Selection is also a huge part in cultural evolution: university acceptations letters, job firing, consumers favoring one brand of cereal over another, etc.
  
• Metapatterns show up in both biological and cultural evolutions, ex: “columns of support” can be seen as legs, tree trunks, Eiffel tower struts. (iconography as well: corn stalk acting as a connection from underworld to our world as column, functioning as a symbol of nutrition and psychological influence of support).
• Metapatterns are particularly successful when the two categories (bio/cult) converge.
• Borders: part of a system that can isolate a system from an environment, or regulate the exchange of matter, energy, info etc.
• Biologically: borders are the membrane of a cell, culturally: national boarders play a role of filtering matter (growing and shrinking in ‘pore’ size).
• Borders then relate back to selection in evolution: to allow some elements of the outside world into your inner realm is to make one’s self vulnerable to the dangers, threatening one’s survival.