I have to admit that I was about a quarter of the way through “On the Origin of Tepees” before I totally realized the title was a pun.

Part of that is because I completely glossed over the first word and thought of it only as “The Origin of Tepees.”  Essentially the wheel that spins this story along would be the same with that title, but the real one does a much better job of explaining the context.

In short, this book is about how ideas evolve, as examined through the way tepee adoption and technology changed over time.  Author Jonnie Hughes takes a trip across the United States, tracing the paths of different American Indian tribes across the plains (where tepees were in use) and noting differences along the way.

But the trip is a way to explain the idea that although idea evolution shares some characteristics with biological evolution, there are major differences made possible by humans.  Other organisms can teach each other things, but as Hughes says, humans are the best thought-swappers:

“Mother Nature achieved a design first, the goal of any technical engineer: she created a future-proof product, a product with “hardware” so sophisticated that it required no further work.  All it would ever need to take on the future was upgraded “software.”

As long as our “software” keeps going — and the capacity of our brains is astounding — then our culture will keep growing.

An earlier theory of biological evolution posited that acquired characteristics would be passed down to offspring.  That description sounds a lot like what we think of when considering culture and the learning that goes along with the distribution of ideas by humans.  But as Hughes writes, there’s a very key difference that makes this idea evolution different:

“Individual ideas go in to a mind, change their traits over several generations in order to adapt to the selective environment they discover inside that mind, then come out different from the Ideas that went in.  This means that the adaptation that happens within a mind is the same as the adaptation that happens between minds.”

The idea of idea evolution itself is not new, but rather what Hughes describes as the “goggles” through which he is viewing his particular quest.  The makers of his “goggles” include Richard Dawkins who coined a word we are all familiar with these days:  meme.

It’s “a body that secured its passage into the future only by building successful ideas that could leap from one mind to the next.  [Dawkins] called this new replicator the meme.”

Some memes ended up as the most advanced tepees.  More recently, they became this:

Yes, the one on the right is my niece.  Yes, with the help of my younger brother I did make an entire book of these.  Yes, they are all hysterical.