The Adaptive Gene

Ken and O.D. both make excellent points about the selfish gene. Sometimes it's advantageous to be competitive, and sometimes it's advantageous to be cooperative. Sometimes the market wants quality, and sometimes the market wants quantity. If you want to be successful in this world, you have to be adaptable. When it's cold, you wear bear skins and build fires. When it's hot, you wear bare skins and go swimming. If your tribe rejects you, you join a different tribe or start one of your own. I doubt that primitive humans gave much thought to spreading their genes around, they were just trying to get laid because it was a fun thing to do. Of course you can't get laid if you're dead, so the first thing you need to do is survive long enough to reach puberty. After that, you do whatever it takes to survive from one day to the next. All other factors being equal, the longer you live, the more chances you will get to spread your genes around, even if you have no idea exactly what a gene is.

I'm not sure that any of this is explains the phenomenon of fandom. That probably has something to do with the way people like to get excited. It was necessary for primitive humans to get excited about stuff, otherwise they wouldn't do anything. While cognitive thinking helps in the planning stage, it is emotion that motivates people to action. At some point, people discovered that you don't have to actually do anything to get excited, that emotion could be generated independent of action. Some other people recognized that there was money to be made from this, and the entertainment business was born.

I have heard both versions of "99 Bottles", and have come to prefer "Take one down, pass it around" because it sounds more proactive than just waiting around for one of those bottles to fall by random chance. I was not familiar with the last verse "Go to the store, get some more", but I like it because it constitutes a logical bridge for starting the song all over again. I don't remember ever getting through all 99 bottles as a kid because one of the adults in the car always shut the song down before that. I supposed that just meant that the song was effective. On long motor trips, if the adults started to get cranky, we could always cheer them up with that song. When one of them shouted "That's enough!" we took it as a sign that the song had accomplished it's purpose so there was no need to continue singing it. I believe it was while driving a school bus that I got to sing the whole song all the way through for the first time. It was on a field trip of some kind, there was a teacher on the bus and, when we completed the song and began to sing it again, she hollered "That's enough!" I guess that teacher took longer than my parents to become cheered up. She must have had a hard life.