The best inventions of history wouldn’t have been possible if they hadn’t used ideas from other inventions.

In the third and fourth episodes of “Everything is a Remix,” Ferguson discusses how important copying is in our learning endeavors.

Bob Dylan’s first album had 11 cover songs on it. No one starts original. We learn from others and by learning from them we create based on what we see them do.

Copy, transform, combine. By learning how to utilize these things, we are able to create to our full potential. Some of the greatest inventions in history came when creators copied ideas and combined them with other ideas to transform them into something new.

For example, Steve Jobs said Apple was shameless about stealing ideas from others. By copying ideas from Xerox’s computers and combining them with the idea of “household computers,” he was able to completely change the market.

We may be tempted to think that some of the biggest inventions from history have been big because they are original, but truthfully, no invention has ever been fully original. Even inventions like the printing press were made possible because of the invention of other things leading up to it. For instance, if paper and ink had never been invented, the printing press wouldn’t have been invented. It’s as simple as that.

In the beginning of his last video, Ferguson talks about evolution. That however many billions of years ago a single organism was there and then it copied, and then the copies copied, etc. That’s what has created all the species. I don’t believe this at all, and I think it’s a ridiculous viewpoint on where life came from. He uses this as a way of signaling that with all of the “remixes,” people are getting smarter and better.

In its roots, this is a very Marxist approach. The strong survive and live on and the weak die off. I happen to believe that while these many remixes are creating an easier, more comfortable life with much new technology, I don’t think that’s it’s a signal that we are getting smarter or better.

We are simply building off of those who were smarter. Here’s a bit of a silly example, but I think it might help to get the picture in your head.

Picture elevation. You have sea level at 0 ft and Mount Everest at 29,029 ft. You have a person who starts at sea level and hikes up 1,000 ft, then they let someone else take over, they go up more and hand it off again, the next person continues to climb. This keeps going until pretty soon you have someone at the base camp of Mount Everest. 17,598 ft. They hike 25 ft. They are now at 17,648 ft.

Everyone marvels at the height they have gotten to. They look at the people from before and say “good job, but we’re way past your intellect. Look at where we are.” But who really accomplished more? Who was really smarter? You can’t look only at where people are, you must look at where they started.

I love this idea of everything being a remix. I fully believe that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything we do is built off of the generations who went before. Each invention off of the one previous. However, I think it much better speaks to creations with many adaptations rather than an evolution of better creators.