Singer of Code
- Rick Lake, CAIA, CETF, CBDA
- Mar 9
- 1 min read
Updated: Mar 20
Written for Panoptica
Date: March 9th, 2026.
The Darwin of the Classics. And AI?
He was called the “Darwin of the Classics.” His name was Milman Parry.
In 1952, classical scholar H.T. Wade-Gery wrote:
“As Darwin seemed to many to have removed the finger of God from the creation of the world and of man, so Milman Parry has seemed to some to remove the creative poet from the Iliad and Odyssey.”[1]
Just as Darwin showed that life emerges through biological evolution rather than divine fiat, Parry demonstrated that epic poetry emerges through narrative evolution—traditional oral composition across generations—rather than lone effort.
He solved the Homeric Question which had dogged scholars for centuries: what was the genesis of the Iliad and the Odyssey? In doing so, he discovered something he could not have imagined: the fundamental principles by which artificial intelligence would one day compose language.
This is an excerpt of the full article written here:
by by By Rick Lake, CAIA, CETF, CBDA | Founder, Narrative Alpha
