A quick tale, may be apocryphal, but if anyone knows more please supply references.
Some scientists gather six monkeys into a room, and in that room is a pole leading up to the ceiling where a bag of bananas await. They monkeys, naturally, start to climb the pole to get to the bananas ... at which point the scientists turn on the high-pressure water jets.
Repeat until those six monkeys (a) get rather wet, and (b) learn not to climb the pole.
Then, the scientists take one monkey out, replacing him with a new monkey. This new monkey sees the bananas and goes for them ... but the other five monkeys, who know what happens next, hold that new monkey back. Repeat.
Eventually the scientists manage to remove all monkeys that have had first hand experience of the water training, leaving behind only monkeys that have been restrained by their fellows, but don't know why.
Resulting Context: a room full of monkeys that have a certain BehavioralNorm, but without knowing why.
This teaches us ...
Suppose then that the scientists will not use the water jets on the monkeys. Then, the monkeys have no actual reason to avoid climbing the pole, but they still have a perceived reason (the scientists are bastards).
Not quite -- note that the current population of monkeys have never witnessed the past negative consequences. They don't have a perceived reason, only a taboo passed down from their predecessors.
The resulting context in this case is only temporary, monkeys being curious animals. I predict eventually some monkey will decide that he or she should climb the pole to find out what's going on or because he or she is hungry. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but sometimes it's the only way to break through taboos that are no longer sound.
George, the curious monkey, would have to get past the other five monkeys first ... and they've been trained by their fellow monkeys not to let any one climb the pole.
For more info, read the article "Chimp Culture" by Tim Friend. From the web page:
Separate chimpanzee societies develop their own traditions and customs, according to field researchers from seven sites in Africa
I bet there are other articles on this available. I first read about it in the ScientificAmerican. -- AlexSchroeder
Interesting article! Here are two things I particular like:
- culture is behavior passed from one generation to the next through observation, imitation and practice.
- Grooming, which strengthens social bonds, [...]
- this makes me think that the ability, in a wiki, to fix up one another's spelling errors or typo's, as well as other minor fixings (eg. putting CategoryHomePage onto someone's home page), is a form of social grooming, conducive to building a stronger wiki community.
-- es
More on culture, this time with Guppies http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/books/chapters/15-1stdugat.html?searchpv=day04 which also makes the point that culture is information passed from one generation to the next through imitation. It also reminded me that Darwin's theory of natural selection wasn't based on genetic inheritance, as that knowledge wasn't discovered until much later.