Evolution, The Greatest Show Everywhere

There is an idea in programming that is relatively new and really bad, it goes like this:

Don't reinvent the wheel.

As appealing as it sounds, there are many reasons this idea just sucks. The most important one being that modern technology is only possible because we did indeed reinvent the wheel, several times.

The very first wheels were likely wooden cart wheels, the only similarity they have to modern wheels is that they are round. The only similarity between the millions of different modern wheels is that they too are round.

Each new wheel is a reinvention of the previous ones, it is not simply an improvement. Someone took the idea of a wheel then worked to make that idea help in a completely new way, from gears to steering apparatuses, each one is a unique invention that uses the same idea as the original wheel.

This is also how successful applications are, they are reinventions or all new. Redundant applications, ones that are identical to older ones, never succeed.

This is how all reality works, you see it in nature, the chemical reactions we call life are reinvented every generation. Ideals are the same as well, a fact that is ignored or even denied by religious people.

Ideology is often founded on very bad ideas, notions and prejudices of a primitive mind incapable of understanding the world, the universe, around them. The time when religions are born their ideals sound great, slavery and genocide are merely self defense.

As time progresses we reinvent our ideals, slavery and genocide are not justifiable and were just bad ideas of a primitive mind. Religion, however, opposes this because it proves that their old ideals are barbaric and unjustifiable.

So, like the original wagon wheel, these bad ideals are replaced by better ideals in societies that choose to advance. Sadly there are societies that refuse to move forward, they refuse to use the reinvented wheel just because they are fooled into thinking the old one is comfortable.

A great thinker, who has a few problems of his own, once said that evolution was the greatest show on Earth. He was mistaken, for it is the greatest show in reality.

Our ideals must evolve, we must reinvent them in order to discover what is truly a perfect set of ideals or we will, inevitably, destroy our minds and then our selves.