[GistNoesis]

I like to think that inventions/concepts/idea have a life of their own. They interact, reproduce, mutate. They grow around themselves bubbles of compatible ideas. Sometimes they compete to kill other ideas.

When viewed this way as a complex system, it become more easy to understand their behavior as emergent properties of the system. Systems can come to equilibrium, then won't move anymore. They can also take some time to reach equilibrium, traversing full of saddle-points landscapes. Systems that have reached equilibrium are not interesting anymore as they are not thriving, in the concept ecosystem this is the equivalent of being dead. As long as there are alive, these systems are subjected to Darwinian evolutions, which would explain the tendency for systems which take a long time to converge.

But interesting systems (turing complete) can also exhibit chaotic behavior, and knowing when they will crash can't be predicted (halting problem). Any biologist know that ecosystems are fragile and can be pushed either side of the frontier of chaos.

I also like to think of inventions/concept as numbers, which can be factored, multiplied and added. Sometimes you get a new prime number (or was it there all along :) ).

[mojoe]

I believe this concept was where the term "meme" came from (coined by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene)

[Gibbon1]

There is a chapter on acetylene lamps I read. There was maybe 50-75 years of development by different companies and inventors trying to solve a bunch of issues with a frankly simple device. Easy enough to build a lamp the slowly drips water on to calcium carbide and burns the acetylene, that works on the bench.

Now build one that will work reliably when the miner dropped it, cleaned and refiled with water from murky puddle, in the dark 500 feet below ground.