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352 Conversion

steering mechanisms and other features, and the designs that flew well, met
with pilot approval and so forth were carried forward to the next generation of
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airplanes. In this case, the variation-selection principle can be said to replace
a handful of murkier folk ideas about technology; for example, that inventors
come up with designs to fill particular needs, that designs are derived math-
ematically from physics and so on. Second, the variation-selection principle
has been applied to the development of fads and fashions in popular culture in
the theory of so-called memes: Small snippets of culture – a phrase, a way of
wearing a baseball cap, a melody, a slogan, an orthographic rule violation as in
eBay, iPod – are constantly generated and they multiply if they catch on; soon
variations appear, which in turn may or may not catch on and in turn multi-
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ply. My claim is not that these variation-selection theories are correct, but
that both Vincent’s theory of aviation design and the meme theory of popular
culture are examples of resubsumption. In both cases, a domain that at first
was thought of in other than variation-selection terms was resubsumed under
the already known theory of biological evolution.

Summary
The resubsumption theory postulates complex interactions among five different
processes, each with its own set of triggering conditions. The background pro-
cess is routine, monotonic belief formation in response to new information.
Operating on the two principles of Ubiquitous Encoding and Truth as Default,
this process responds to information about domains of experience A, B, C, … by
forming multiple belief systems or informal theories, Th(A), Th(B), Th(C), …
which encode the person’s habitual ways of thinking about objects, relations and
events in those domains. Because people operate with Local Coherence, the rela-
tions between such informal theories tend to escape scrutiny. If Th(A) happens
to be applicable to domain B, and if the person possesses an overarching theory
Th(0) that implies that Th(A) and Th(B) cannot both be true, then the parallel,
monotonic growth of the two belief systems has created a latent theory-theory
conflict.
The second process is bisociation, a mental event in which the two contexts
A and B intersect, and Th(A) and Th(B) come to be applied simultaneously to
some object, event or phenomenon. For bisociation to happen, the concepts
and principles of Th(A) must be applicable to B and they must become active
at some moment in time when the person is attending to B. This could happen
through spontaneous reminding, analogical or similarity-based, of Th(A) in
the presence of B; via social interaction that activates Th(A) in a situation in