He called it the meme, and it became his most memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytizing against religiosity. “Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” he wrote.

But knowledge in the network is different from group decision making based on copying and parroting. It seems to develop by accretion; it can give full weight to quirks and exceptions; the challenge is to recognize it and gain access to it.

Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing—syllogisms can be spoken as well as written—but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently.

Now time could be either local or standard, and the distinction baffled most people. The railroads required standard time, and the telegraph made it feasible. ... When faraway places were coordinated in time, they could finally measure their longitude precisely. The key to measuring longitude was knowing the time someplace else and the distance to that place.

No, he said: the organism feeds upon negative entropy. “To put it less paradoxically,” he added paradoxically, “the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.” In other words, the organism sucks orderliness from its surroundings.