"Ideas die in our place"
On EPIST swag, letterhead, and informational webpages, you will find these words, "Ideas die in our place."
Why?
Death is a critical part of evolution. In order for a species to advance, the weak must die so that the fittest will survive and reproduce.
But as humans, our behaviors aren't purely heritable impulses. We've developed advanced cognition and then externalized that cognition in precise language.
Our survival is based on ideas. Human progress depends on the competition of ideas. Survival of the fittest—where the weak die and the strong survive.
Ideas die in our place.
EPIST provides the arena.
In 1859 Charles Darwin described "natural selection" as a process where organisms compete for survival.
In that same year, John Stuart Mill argued for the free and open exchange of ideas. He believed that even an unpopular or false idea should be allowed to be expressed because its refutation, through open debate, serves to strengthen the truth.
In 1864 Herbert Spencer extended natural selection with the phrase "survival of the fittest" to expand the concept outside of biology to society and economics.
In 1925 Alfred North Whitehead said "The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying", explaining that by allowing our ideas to be challenged, tested, and even "killed" when they are found to be flawed, we avoid the more destructive consequences of acting on those flawed ideas in the real world.
EPIST inherits their philosophies and uses the latest technologies to supercharge the marketplace of ideas and add an accelerant to human evolution. We are on the verge of a Cambrian explosion of human flourishing.