Family trees & #copycopycopy

As a teenager, I was obsessed with music and the chronicling of connections.

Sometimes we talked about these connections as influences (Q2 at rock journalist school: what are your influences?), sometimes in terms of family trees, like this kind of thing by the great Pete Frame (who did you play with, on what tracks, etc). In writing his definitive book on Bowie’s pianist, Mike Garson, my old school mate, Clifford Slapper has had to dig through this kind of detail again and again.

The good old weekly NME – of which I was a eager reader, especially through the punk/new wave era, seemed to try to pull these very small bits of history together every week – as if they were important and rather grand documents, worth inscribing on vellum (see the effect above).

Something more like this:

…which spans a rather longer time frame.

I’ve also come across similar kinds of phylogenic visualisation in many other fields: e.g. in language

Cultural anthropologists like my co-authors on I’ll Have What She’s Having, Alex Bentley and Mike O’Brien find this kind of phylogeny useful to show how the development of  technology both ancient and modern can also be depicted using the same framework. Evolution being a framework for describing dynamic change in any system, not just of animals. It requires 3 elements: the means to reproduce, to create variation and – least obvious to us except after the fact – selection (fitness for a specific emerging context).

The reason why this kind of tree is is useful in these and other contexts is simply that phylogeny is all about the relationships between items over time: what one takes from a previous generation and how variations in what it is passed (on or not) creates difference in succeeding generations.

Just as Babbage’s design for the Difference Engine was made programmable by the use of a technology developed for the french textile industry (the punchcard), so it is with music and biology. They are all based fundamentally on copying as the means to do the first of the two of evolution’s jobs: reproduction and variation.

Doesn’t that make you feel a little different about your position and role as an “innovator”? As someone looking to make new things? Your job – in the long run – is to copy and create some error. More on that shortly.

But before we go, it’s worth noting here that the way you draw a phylogenic tree (top to bottom, bottom to top or left to right) is convention bound – something, too which is copied and passed on within a group. I’m sure we could do a tree for that, too if we had the scholarly resources and time, too. Ah, me – Copy Copy Copy. It’s all around us.