NB
Yay, socread turned one last Sunday!
It’s been an interesting journey. And though the reading groups are admittedly thinner these days, I can’t overstate the importance of these sessions for me personally.
But more on that in a separate reflection. Let’s get down to the task at hand: a quick breakdown of what folks read last weekend.
I had to postpone the founder-focused reading (Quest) in IST due to an Urgent Care visit for my kid. Hello, Mary. I thought the flu season was over!
The other sessions that bracket Quest went as planned. Here’s what we read:
Two Essays and A Book Chapter
The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes.
This bold claim is the core premise of Chapter 15 of the book The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.
In the chapter, titled The Evolution of Culture, Deutsch explains cultural evolution through memes1 or ideas that replicate by alternating between being a memory in a human brain and an enacted behavior.
The chapter contrasts two fundamental types of societies based on how their memes evolve:
Static societies remain practically unchanged by systematically suppressing human creativity and critical thought. They are dominated by anti-rational memes, which survive precisely by disabling the critical faculties of the people who hold them.
Dynamic societies, such as the post-Enlightenment West, embrace rapid change and progress. They are sustained by rational memes, which are objectively useful or true ideas that actually rely on open criticism and reasoned thought to faithfully replicate.
Deutsch contends that our current civilization is in an unstable transition period where both rational and anti-rational memes still coexist. To sustain the “beginning of infinity,” we must deliberately reject the dogmatic “Because I say so” mechanisms of static societies and become active agents of progress through creativity and criticism.
That’s the chapter in brief.
This about wraps up the social readings from Mar 15, 2026. But before you go,
You Are Welcome…
… to join the social reading sessions. We organize three sessions every Sunday.
There’s one each for broader audiences in IST (India) and PT (Americas), and one with focus on entrepreneurship in IST.
You can read curated surprises or bring your own read. We alternate between these formats on a weekly basis. The schedule and session links are here.
See you in one of the sessions soon.
While commonly used today to mean internet image macros, the technical definition of memes covers all learned cultural behaviors, from wearing clothes to using specific phrases.