Chapter 2 reads John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy in the context of cybernetics theorists Norbert Wiener’s and Claude Shannon’s contradictory definitions of information (Wiener’s theories align the concept with pattern, while Shannon instead describes it as a measure of randomness). Love argues that Dos Passos’s trilogy integrates both sides of this opposition in ways that are important to our understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of early twentieth-century cybernetic thinking. Focusing on the novels’ “Newsreel” sections, she illustrates how this technology – in both form and content, as well as broader industry practices – epitomizes the logic of cybernetic information. By incorporating a literary version of this media form into his novels, Dos Passos demonstrates how predictable patterns jostle with random chance as catalysts for change and progress in the United States. This interdisciplinary pairing shows (a) how cybernetics theories can help us understand the ideological work that texts like Dos Passos’s novels and newsreel productions undertake, and (b) how modernist literature encouraged readers to develop strategies for cybernetic thinking.

Anti-evolutionists often employ the closely related mathematical theories of information and combinatorial search. We introduce both of these fields, present the major anti-evolutionist arguments, and then explain why they are wrong.