A process of relentless honing and winnowing

I like this from Seer Blest by Sam Sacks quoting Frank Kermode:

“The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity,” he once wrote for the only sermon he ever delivered, “is to an incalculable extent a history of error.”

In this rendition, scholars become the genes replicating intellectual memes down through time, a constant source of variation because they are subject to error. Ideas become refined over time by their survival through faulty replication. A process of relentless honing and winnowing.