richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

T H E R O O T S O F R E L I G I O N 195
In the drawing version of the experiment, all the generation
10 drawings would bear some slight resemblance to the generation 1
drawing. And within each team, the resemblance would more or
less steadily deteriorate as you proceed down the generations. In the
origami version of the experiment, by contrast, the mistakes would
be all-or-none: they'd be 'digital' mutations. Either a team
would make no mistakes and the generation 10 junk would be no
worse, and no better, on average than that produced by generation
5 or generation 1; or there would be a 'mutation' in some particular
generation and all downstream efforts would be complete failures,
often faithfully reproducing the mutation.
What is the crucial difference between the two skills? It is that
the origami skill consists of a series of discrete actions, none of
which is difficult to perform in itself. Mostly the operations are
things like 'Fold both sides into the middle.' A particular team
member may execute the step ineptly, but it will be clear to the next
team member down the line what he is trying to do. The origami
steps are 'self-normalizing'. It is this that makes them 'digital'. It is
like my master carpenter, whose intention to flatten the nail head in
the wood is obvious to his apprentice, regardless of the details
of the hammer blows. Either you get a given step of the origami
recipe right or you don't. The drawing skill, by contrast, is an
analogue skill. Everybody can have a go, but some people copy a
drawing more accurately than others, and nobody copies it perfectly.
The accuracy of the copy depends, too, on the amount of
time and care devoted to it, and these are continuously variable
quantities. Some team members, moreover, will embellish and
'improve', rather than strictly copy, the preceding model.
Words - at least when they are understood - are self-normalizing
in the same kind of way as origami operations. In the original game
of Chinese Whispers (Telephone) the first child is told a story, or a
sentence, and is asked to pass it on to the next child, and so on. If
the sentence is less than about seven words, in the native language
of all the children, there is a good chance that it will survive, unmutated,
down ten generations. If it is in an unknown foreign
language, so that the children are forced to imitate phonetically
rather than word by word, the message does not survive. The pattern
of decay down the generations is then the same as for a drawing,