What Baby Shark and the Supreme Court Have in Common
The universal power of experimentation, selection, and persistence to shape our world
Everything that one might consider intelligent design is, in fact, mostly shaped by evolution. And I don’t just mean soaring giraffe necks, springy frog legs, and scented cherry blossoms. Survival-of-the-fittest certainly sculpts the thriving magnificence of life in nature, but the same is true for phenomena produced by us humans, too. Sedans, songs, and systems of government are all subject to similar winnowing from selection, and understanding how this universal creative force works can help us build a better future.
I have always been captivated by the simplicity and beauty of reductive reasoning1 — explanations for the emergence of magical properties like the flight of airplanes using the stuff of middle school science classes, like Bernoulli’s principle of moving fluids and Archimedes’ principle of buoyancy. By making the world make sense, we can build almost anything. Or can we?
A middle school biology project introduced me to the deceptive complexity of life forms. I dissected chickens from my father’s poultry farm, and neatly organized their “digestive system” in preserved jars, though such reductive labels obscure the hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary phenomena embedded in living beings. I spent the next couple of decades, first training to be a “bioengineer” and then realizing how hard it is to deliberately build new biological systems. Airplanes and space shuttles are in fact easier, which still boggles my mind.
Many aspects of our everyday lives are influenced by vastly complex entities that build gradually. Things like our health insurance systems lack a single set of designers, but they too are still always being adjusted, changed, and propagated. An evolutionary lens brings us surprisingly close to a unifying theory of creativity — that ideas and inventions evolve much like living organisms. We can ask questions like: how do new ideas and objects come into being to start with, and how do those entities morph over time?
As a parent of two toddlers, I didn’t need to look too far for an example of the first question. Baby Shark is both a potent force and a great example of creativity emerging at a moment in time. And to better understand how the forces of time affect change, we’ll look at one of the longest standing institutions in the oldest continuous democracy in the world: the American Supreme Court.
Let’s start with Baby Shark, one of the most explosive internet memes of the last few years. During its peak popularity in 2018, a middle-aged children’s musician in Upstate New York, Johny Only, abruptly received a barrage of messages. They referred him to the exploding sensation that sounded exactly like one his own previous recordings. Only’s rendition which was posted on YouTube seven years earlier, was one of hundreds of variants preceding the ultimately viral version. It features his own children, nieces, and nephews splashing in his sister’s swimming pool. Johnny was improvising a song that originated with the movie Jaws in the 1970s, and in its earlier forms, Baby Shark had much gorier lyrics. Those lyrics made it to young teens in summer camps, which in turn were fertile breeding grounds for even more variations. At one point, the song even picked up goofy hand motions and dance steps. Eventually, it spread to the internet.
Viewers on YouTube now chose their favorite mutations, propagating Johnny’s version. It retained the dance moves, but lost the edgy lyrics. Johnny, drawing on his own experiences with children’s music, used a familiar nursery rhyme scheme, built tempo, and varied his voice as it went along. All of that made the song catchier for younger children — his video gathered 100,000 views by the end of 2018. At the same time, Korean company Pinkfong had been producing hundreds of songs for toddlers. In their experiments, Pinkfong layered on a bouncier tune, more instruments, keys, and choruses. Baby Shark and its "doo-doo-doo-doos" were now perfectly adapted, from a niche camp tune, to one that no three-year-old on the planet could resist. In 2021, YouTube views for this chiseled diamond surpassed the population of the world.
Baby Shark shows the power of variation. If you make a large number of options with different flavors, moods, and tunes, pick the ones that seem to do something new and interesting, and vary them again, soon enough you will have found a gem you could never have designed otherwise. But Baby Shark was a flash in the pan. And aren’t we most interested in the enduring entities that are a bit more impactful to our everyday lives than a children’s song?
Let’s take the US supreme court, which presides over a patient, decades long reshaping of our American judiciary. It acts as evidence that the evolutionary process does not necessarily lead to unforeseen solutions, and instead that it can be very deliberately directed, and not always for the greater good. Importantly, learning from this calculated evolution may hold clues for how we can try to nudge our world towards the utopias2 we seek instead of letting selfish interests take over.
Our law, like our culture, shifts with time. It shifts temporarily when our judges change, and then it shifts more permanently when they pass new precedents. The Federalist Society might be an antihero that understands these forces better than anyone and hence serves as an instructive example of an agent orchestrating those changes. Since its founding in 1982, this national network of lawyers, judges, and legal scholars has focused on a tectonic conservative evolution by very specific selection and nurturing. Working hand-in-glove with the likes of oil companies and car makers, the Federalist Society has cultivated cadres of legal experts steeped in conservative legal doctrines. In 2014 alone, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a leading donor to the Federalist Society, spent fourteen million dollars to support such candidates for various state-level judicial and attorney general elections.
As business-friendly judges fill the ranks, corporate haymakers do the rest. For instance, whenever Walmart is sued in a labor dispute, it can decide whether to settle or play the odds based on which court is at play. Between the 1960s and the 2000s, Walmart’s success rate in labor and employment cases went up from 50% to 66%. Each new win sets a precedent and biases our body of common law in favor of corporate interests for future legal battles. The gradual evolution of American Law has relied less on the random generation of variants and instead on the selection of a certain style of judges and the propagation of their new legal ideas.
Hence, the potent tools of evolution — variation, selection, and persistence — are always at work, both at random and on assignment, which transforms our world one lasting change at a time. As with Baby Shark, rapid experimentation in the real world is a helpful tool to create “fit” solutions. But nothing persists in its created form, and by no means is anything guaranteed to serve the purpose it was originally intended to. This same manipulation of the American judicial system both drives home the risk from self-interested agents and a roadmap for how similar evolution could be affected for more utilitarian ends.
What a great analogy and a calming antidote to the news. I have been thinking about the evolution of ideas and it's interesting to look at it from this perspective. Very well written. :) But gosh I'm so annoyed that now I have this do-do-do-do-do stuck in my head. Yet. Again.
I love how this essay turned out!