PART 5: THE IMMUNE SYSTEM IS A MEME — AND THE BODY IS US
🧠 Memes: The Genes of Culture
In nineteen seventy-six, biologist Richard Dawkins introduced a now-famous idea in his book The Selfish G...
PART 6: THE OXYGEN EVENT — WHEN THE ENVIRONMENT STARTS TO CHANGE BACK
🫁 Not Just Another Organism
So far, we’ve been looking at Bitcoin as if it were an emerging organism—alive in the way certain systems can be alive. It metabolizes energy. It stores information. It adapts. It replicates. And it defends itself—not by fighting, but by being hard to corrupt.
But what happens when something like that doesn’t just survive in its environment—what happens when it starts to change the environment itself?
In evolutionary history, that moment happened once before. And it changed everything.
⸻
🌬️ Earth’s First Global Revolution
Roughly two and a half billion years ago, the Earth’s atmosphere was very different than it is today. It had almost no oxygen. Life consisted mostly of anaerobic microbes—organisms that couldn’t survive in the presence of oxygen. To them, it was toxic.
Then, something unexpected happened.
A new kind of microbe evolved: cyanobacteria. These early ancestors of algae figured out how to perform photosynthesis—a way of turning sunlight into energy. The process gave them an evolutionary edge. But it had a byproduct: oxygen.
At first, this oxygen was absorbed by minerals and oceans. But over millions of years, it began to accumulate in the air. Slowly, imperceptibly, the planet began to change.
This wasn’t an invasion. It was a chemical inevitability. The microbes didn’t mean to terraform Earth—they just did what worked for them. But the side effect was profound.
This is now known as the Great Oxygenation Event. It wiped out most of the life that couldn’t adapt. But it also paved the way for everything that came after: complex cells, animals, breath, fire, intelligence.
In other words: the oxygen that killed some forms of life also made new kinds of life possible.
⸻
🧠 Sanity as an Externality
Bitcoin isn’t releasing oxygen. But it is releasing something—an externality that, to some systems, feels just as toxic.
That externality is truth.
More precisely: verifiability. Finality. Scarcity. Indifference to narrative. These are not slogans. They are properties—unforgeable, replicable, permissionless.
In an economic system built on opacity, discretion, and centralized privilege, Bitcoin is corrosive. It undermines hidden subsidies. It competes with capital controls. It exposes debasement. It refuses to be censored.
But for systems built on honesty, auditability, and free cooperation, Bitcoin is oxygen. It clears the fog. It creates the conditions for trust—not by appealing to authority, but by enforcing consensus through physics.
Bitcoin’s “toxin” is clarity. And that’s exactly what makes it useful.
⸻
🧳 The Covered Wagon Arrives
Daniel Dennett gives a powerful metaphor for how ideas reshape the world: when the first covered wagon with wheels arrives in a new land, it doesn’t just bring goods—it brings the idea of wheeled transport. From that point forward, people can build wagons of their own.
It’s a bootstrapping mechanism. A ratchet. An irreversible shift.
Bitcoin is a covered wagon.
When it arrives in a country, on a phone, in a policy debate—it doesn’t just bring digital payments. It brings the idea of self-sovereign, incorruptible money. And once that idea takes root, it spreads—not because of propaganda, but because of utility.
People adopt Bitcoin materially because it helps them. And in doing so, they internalize the idea that trust can be replaced with verification. That central authority can be replaced with consensus. That permission can be replaced with protocol.
That’s the loop.
The idea arrives. It benefits someone. And that benefit becomes the next vector.
⸻
🧬 Extended Phenotypes: Who Is Evolving Whom?
Biologists use the term extended phenotype to describe how genes express themselves beyond the body. A spider’s web is part of the spider’s phenotype. A beaver’s dam is part of the beaver’s phenotype. A skyscraper is part of ours.
Bitcoin is now part of our extended phenotype. It lives in our institutions, our language, our behavior. It shapes how we store value, how we transact, how we build infrastructure.
But look closer, and you see the inversion.
We are also part of Bitcoin’s extended phenotype.
We run the nodes. We design the ASIC chips. We write the memes. We build the custody models. We defend the forks. We educate the next generation. We act in ways that help the protocol replicate—not because we were forced, but because we were incentivized.
In this way, Bitcoin behaves like a parasite or symbiont—except the host (us) benefits.
It’s a feedback loop of survival: we help it grow, it helps us adapt. We defend it, it defends us. It is shaping us into better stewards of truth-based systems.
And that makes it more than a tool.
It makes it a selective pressure.
⸻
🧬 Changing the Climate, Not the Weather
Bitcoin isn’t a trend. It’s not a policy. It’s not a movement, in the conventional sense.
It’s a climate change.
It alters the conditions of viability. In a world where money cannot be printed at will, some institutions will collapse. Others will thrive. In a world where transactions are uncensorable, certain tactics—surveillance, financial coercion—lose their grip.
The old organisms—the legacy systems—aren’t all evil. But many are adapted to a low-oxygen environment. They assume opacity. They depend on asymmetry. They thrive on friction.
And as Bitcoin’s oxygen—clarity, sanity, digital scarcity—accumulates, those organisms suffocate.
They don’t lose an argument. They just stop working.
Meanwhile, new life flourishes: open-source payment apps, energy-cooperative miners, censorship-resistant social networks, peer-to-peer lending markets. All of them optimized for this new air.
Bitcoin doesn’t have to win every fight.
It just has to change the conditions of survival.
🫁 Not Just Another Organism
So far, we’ve been looking at Bitcoin as if it were an emerging organism—alive in the way certain systems can be alive. It metabolizes energy. It stores information. It adapts. It replicates. And it defends itself—not by fighting, but by being hard to corrupt.
But what happens when something like that doesn’t just survive in its environment—what happens when it starts to change the environment itself?
In evolutionary history, that moment happened once before. And it changed everything.
⸻
🌬️ Earth’s First Global Revolution
Roughly two and a half billion years ago, the Earth’s atmosphere was very different than it is today. It had almost no oxygen. Life consisted mostly of anaerobic microbes—organisms that couldn’t survive in the presence of oxygen. To them, it was toxic.
Then, something unexpected happened.
A new kind of microbe evolved: cyanobacteria. These early ancestors of algae figured out how to perform photosynthesis—a way of turning sunlight into energy. The process gave them an evolutionary edge. But it had a byproduct: oxygen.
At first, this oxygen was absorbed by minerals and oceans. But over millions of years, it began to accumulate in the air. Slowly, imperceptibly, the planet began to change.
This wasn’t an invasion. It was a chemical inevitability. The microbes didn’t mean to terraform Earth—they just did what worked for them. But the side effect was profound.
This is now known as the Great Oxygenation Event. It wiped out most of the life that couldn’t adapt. But it also paved the way for everything that came after: complex cells, animals, breath, fire, intelligence.
In other words: the oxygen that killed some forms of life also made new kinds of life possible.
⸻
🧠 Sanity as an Externality
Bitcoin isn’t releasing oxygen. But it is releasing something—an externality that, to some systems, feels just as toxic.
That externality is truth.
More precisely: verifiability. Finality. Scarcity. Indifference to narrative. These are not slogans. They are properties—unforgeable, replicable, permissionless.
In an economic system built on opacity, discretion, and centralized privilege, Bitcoin is corrosive. It undermines hidden subsidies. It competes with capital controls. It exposes debasement. It refuses to be censored.
But for systems built on honesty, auditability, and free cooperation, Bitcoin is oxygen. It clears the fog. It creates the conditions for trust—not by appealing to authority, but by enforcing consensus through physics.
Bitcoin’s “toxin” is clarity. And that’s exactly what makes it useful.
⸻
🧳 The Covered Wagon Arrives
Daniel Dennett gives a powerful metaphor for how ideas reshape the world: when the first covered wagon with wheels arrives in a new land, it doesn’t just bring goods—it brings the idea of wheeled transport. From that point forward, people can build wagons of their own.
It’s a bootstrapping mechanism. A ratchet. An irreversible shift.
Bitcoin is a covered wagon.
When it arrives in a country, on a phone, in a policy debate—it doesn’t just bring digital payments. It brings the idea of self-sovereign, incorruptible money. And once that idea takes root, it spreads—not because of propaganda, but because of utility.
People adopt Bitcoin materially because it helps them. And in doing so, they internalize the idea that trust can be replaced with verification. That central authority can be replaced with consensus. That permission can be replaced with protocol.
That’s the loop.
The idea arrives. It benefits someone. And that benefit becomes the next vector.
⸻
🧬 Extended Phenotypes: Who Is Evolving Whom?
Biologists use the term extended phenotype to describe how genes express themselves beyond the body. A spider’s web is part of the spider’s phenotype. A beaver’s dam is part of the beaver’s phenotype. A skyscraper is part of ours.
Bitcoin is now part of our extended phenotype. It lives in our institutions, our language, our behavior. It shapes how we store value, how we transact, how we build infrastructure.
But look closer, and you see the inversion.
We are also part of Bitcoin’s extended phenotype.
We run the nodes. We design the ASIC chips. We write the memes. We build the custody models. We defend the forks. We educate the next generation. We act in ways that help the protocol replicate—not because we were forced, but because we were incentivized.
In this way, Bitcoin behaves like a parasite or symbiont—except the host (us) benefits.
It’s a feedback loop of survival: we help it grow, it helps us adapt. We defend it, it defends us. It is shaping us into better stewards of truth-based systems.
And that makes it more than a tool.
It makes it a selective pressure.
⸻
🧬 Changing the Climate, Not the Weather
Bitcoin isn’t a trend. It’s not a policy. It’s not a movement, in the conventional sense.
It’s a climate change.
It alters the conditions of viability. In a world where money cannot be printed at will, some institutions will collapse. Others will thrive. In a world where transactions are uncensorable, certain tactics—surveillance, financial coercion—lose their grip.
The old organisms—the legacy systems—aren’t all evil. But many are adapted to a low-oxygen environment. They assume opacity. They depend on asymmetry. They thrive on friction.
And as Bitcoin’s oxygen—clarity, sanity, digital scarcity—accumulates, those organisms suffocate.
They don’t lose an argument. They just stop working.
Meanwhile, new life flourishes: open-source payment apps, energy-cooperative miners, censorship-resistant social networks, peer-to-peer lending markets. All of them optimized for this new air.
Bitcoin doesn’t have to win every fight.
It just has to change the conditions of survival.
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