Idle speculation on a source of new memes.
Dec. 5th, 2004 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupI was just idly peeling an egg this morning, and breaking up the shells to throw into the compost for recycling, when I remembered an old childhood tale about eating hard-boiled eggs. It says that witches can only cross water riding in eggshell halves, so if you want to prevent a shipwreck caused by a witch, you should always crush your eggshells when done with them.
Now, the interesting thing is that these two memes:
1) Whole eggshells don't compost well -- fragments do; and
2) witches need whole eggshells
compete to cause the same behavior. I can even see how, a few hundred years ago when family farms were the norm and composting was common, they may have had a sort of symbiotic relationship. You see, if a parent was infected with #1, he may well wish his huge brood of kids to share his behavior. The trouble is, telling them that it helps the compost is not going to have a lot of sway on kids. Kids are fairly immune to meme #1. On the other hand, meme #2 causes the desired behavior with far more reliability. As the kids age, a signifigant portion (although probably far less than 100%) will slowly become immune to meme #2. Now, they may then ask their parents why they were told such an outlandish thing, and thereby get infect by #1, or they could simply pick up meme #1 from the local farming community, once they are old enough to care about the quality of their compost. What is likely though, is that once infected with meme #1 and having kids of their own, they may well deliberately infect their kids with meme #2 to get the desired effect.
So, now we have a mechanism whereby one can start with a population of rational and sensible adults and end up with the propagation of a nonsensible and irrational meme. Now, there is no way of knowing if the above scenario ever actually happened, but its plausible enough that I'm sure similar things have happened.
Now, the interesting thing is that these two memes:
1) Whole eggshells don't compost well -- fragments do; and
2) witches need whole eggshells
compete to cause the same behavior. I can even see how, a few hundred years ago when family farms were the norm and composting was common, they may have had a sort of symbiotic relationship. You see, if a parent was infected with #1, he may well wish his huge brood of kids to share his behavior. The trouble is, telling them that it helps the compost is not going to have a lot of sway on kids. Kids are fairly immune to meme #1. On the other hand, meme #2 causes the desired behavior with far more reliability. As the kids age, a signifigant portion (although probably far less than 100%) will slowly become immune to meme #2. Now, they may then ask their parents why they were told such an outlandish thing, and thereby get infect by #1, or they could simply pick up meme #1 from the local farming community, once they are old enough to care about the quality of their compost. What is likely though, is that once infected with meme #1 and having kids of their own, they may well deliberately infect their kids with meme #2 to get the desired effect.
So, now we have a mechanism whereby one can start with a population of rational and sensible adults and end up with the propagation of a nonsensible and irrational meme. Now, there is no way of knowing if the above scenario ever actually happened, but its plausible enough that I'm sure similar things have happened.
