That’s a very interesting take, I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before but I think you’re onto something. I definitely agree that people have a limited capacity to receive/understand abstract ideas, and therefore each transmission from human to human loses some of the original meaning, and also gets mixed together with some other meanings imparted by each individual in the chain. The analogy of ideas to living organisms facing evolutionary pressure to reproduce is very cool.

I also see what you’re saying about crazy religions that have moderated with time, but I’m not entirely sure about drawing a distinction between bad ideas that tend to moderate for the better and good ideas that tend to moderate for the worse. Intuitively, I do agree that ideas such as Christianity and Marxism are better than phony religions such as Mormonism and Scientology. But that requires a whole bunch of other arguments to support conclusively.

I feel like it’s really the same process going on with all abstract ideas as they spread among human societies, and it would be somewhat reductive to describe them as changing according to any firm law, or getting better or worse. Rather, it’s probably more accurate to say that they change and adapt according to the specific chain of humans through which they are transmitted, which causes them to become more moderate and simpler in the vast majority of cases, but also has the possibility of augmenting or intensifying them in some ways, albeit rarely.

This allows you to take into account that some bad or irrational or wrong ideas can also be transmuted and reframed into good ideas in an instant, and vice versa. I am thinking about the work of great artists who are able to evoke a certain perspective such that a wrong idea might actually help us to understand something true or beneficial, and conversely of the despot or authoritarian who fancies themself as following a noble ideal, but ends up causing immense suffering in service of that good idea.