Dale Brown's Photos from the 2011 North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Austin, Texas

Maybe "a mammoth undertaking" as you put it, but Eno seems to have covered it in a small handful of interviews and essays and then moved on to other things. This all happened about 15 years ago, and I'm not aware of him spending much if any time on it in the meantime. I don't know if he felt that he'd finished the job, or if he just got bored with it, or thought it wasn't worth the effort since no one else was very excited by it.

But he did say:

My dream is to do for culture what Darwin did for the natural sciences. He established a frame in which it was possible to look at all life, ask serious questions about it and organise it in some way. I've been wanting to do the same thing for culture for a long time. By culture I mean everything from fashion, to fine art, to cake decoration to you know - the whole thing, all the things that humans do.

I think he would have liked to have coined a phrase as pithy as "survival of the fittest" to go along with his Big Theory, but nothing comes to mind to fit that bill.

Anyway, if the connection to this topic and to Blake's original seems obscure, I'll add that these kinds of bicycles and bicycle culture have often reminded me a lot of Eno's sunglasses example. The preferred ride among riders who depend exclusively on a bicycle for transportation, by necessity rather than by choice--here I'm thinking particularly of recent immigrants and the extremely poor--seems to be the NEXT Power Climber. This is what's we bike snobs refer to with a sneer on the bike mailing lists and forums as a "Bike-Shaped Object."

If the purpose of a bicycle is simply to get oneself quickly and reliably from point A to point B at minimal cost, then that $88.00 Wal-Mart bike might be all that's needed. (Actually for many commuters of necessity, it's probably a discarded Wal-Mart bike found on someone else's curb.)

But if its purpose is to make a statement to the world about what sort of a rider--what sort of a person--one is, often by way of an other-worlds exercise wherein one rides a bike suited to the Tour de France, or to a French long-distance randonneur of the 1940s, or a Japanese Keirin racer, then a BSO won't suffice at all.

H.G. Wells wrote about this in The Wheels of Chance in 1896, so it's not exactly a new thing. Even then, cyclists were ruthless in judging each other by the type of bicycles they rode, the clothes they wore, and how fast or far or slowly or recklessly or carefully they rode.

As Eno's contemporary Peter Gabriel put it, "There's safety in numbers when you learn to divide. How can we be in if there is no outside?"

You could say, as enthusiasts often do, that it's about looking for an alternative to the blandness and uniformity of cheap mass-produced goods, recognizing the value of things made by the hands of craftsman. But I don't know if there's even much to be said about that that wasn't covered in painstaking detail by the Arts and Crafts Movement at about the same time as Wells was discovering bicycles.

You wrote:

Personally, I would appreciate a universal concept distinguishing between glorious achievement and human by-product.

Well then maybe I'm here to speak on the behalf of human by-product!

Actually, here's Eno from another interview on this subject:

Does this mean that cake decoration is as valuable as Cezanne? No - I'm saying that the concept of cultural value is an irrelevant and meaningless metric with which to try to compare culture objects because the idea of value as a quality that resides in culture objects is wrong.

But there is value somewhere, isn't there? I mean, we do feel that we have experiences of value when we hear pieces of music or read books or see films or admire textiles, don't we? And when we do, where exactly is it coming from if not from the object?

I think that, in objects of culture, value is always conferred. That's to say, the quality of our experience of something is exactly that: the quality of our experience.

I have a feeling that this also ties in with Robert Pirsig's theme in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanence, which as others have pointed out isn't that much about Zen or motorcycles. What it is about is the question of quality or of value: Why is one thing better than another?

I don't know how much energy I have left on the subject, but I'll add that Pirsig begins the inquiry with the protagonist teaching English composition, knowing that some students' work was simply better than others', but not being able to articulate the difference to them or to give them a list of instructions for writing well.

To use the bicycle example: If the wheels fall off or the frame breaks in half and dumps the rider on the pavement, it isn't a good bicycle. And maybe that $88.00 BSO falls short on some of those practical issues, but that doesn't account for all of the difference between them and the multi-thousand-dollar bikes being shown at the Handbuilt Bicycle Show. Most of the value in those seems to come from the human need for meaning and identity, but as Eno suggests, that need isn't peculiar to the wealthy and privileged.

Maybe I'll write more on this later. I don't think this is a very satisfactory reply, but I'm tired of writing and I'd guess that anyone who's gotten this far is tired of reading.