Kœstler[1] (1968: 64):
However, even if European philosophy were only a series of footnotes to Plato, and even though Aristotle had a millenium stranglehold on physics and astronomy, their influence, when all is said, depended not so much on the originality of the teaching, as on a process of natural selection in the evolution of ideas. Out of a number of ideological mutations, a given society will select that philosophy which it unconsciously feels to be best suited for its need.
Monod (1971/1997: 165-6):
This selection [of ideas] must necessarily operate at two levels: that of the mind itself and that of performance.
The performance value of an idea depends upon the change it brings to the behaviour of the person or the group that adopts it. The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will insure the promotion of the idea itself. Its capacity to “take”, the extent to which it can be “put over” has little to do with the amount of objective truth the idea may contain. The important thing about the stout armature a religious ideology constitutes for a society is not what goes into its structure, but the fact that this structure is accepted, that it gains sway. So one cannot well separate such an idea’s power to spread from its power to perform.
The “spreading power” — the infectivity, as it were — of ideas, is much more difficult to analyse. Let us say that it depends upon preexisting structures in the mind, among them ideas already implanted by culture, but also undoubtedly upon certain innate structures which we are hard put to identify. What is very plain, however, is that the ideas having the highest invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in an immanent destiny, in whose bosom his anxiety dissolves.
Footnote:
[1] Kœstler (1979: 523ff) thought of the evolution of ideas as a continuation of biological evolution, involving mutation, selection, survival-value, and adaptation to a ‘period’s intellectual milieu’.