Biomagnification

I met my friend Jeremy in med school, back when he and I were both the type of people who sit in the center of the front row, studiously taking notes, marinating in all the glorious nerdery.
Jeremy loves grammar. He despises poor punctuation. Where most of us have bad dreams about failure and monsters and our own untimely demise, I believe typos and inadequate syntax may actually be what haunts Jeremy's nightmares.

One day, I came across a meme and sent it to him. He liked it so much, he made it the backdrop on his computer:

A few weeks later, he left his laptop unattended during a break between lectures, so I hacked in, did a bit of Photoshop mischief, and replaced his desktop with this while he wasn't looking:

The break ended. Lectures resumed.
Minutes passed.
Hours passed.
Days went by.
I wondered if he would ever notice the switch.
The following week, suddenly in the middle of a class he looked at his desktop as though seeing it for the first time and physically recoiled in horror and disgust. It still cracks me up to think about that moment. Simply beautiful, really.

I'm currently stuck at home with pinkeye. Since I can't go anywhere for fear of contagion, the only rational approach to the situation has been to sit on the couch with a box of tissues, wiping my goopy eye and watching my favorite movies. Follow me on a tangential train of thought triggered by the movie marathon:
Watching My Fair Lady got me thinking about language and grammar, which reminded me of Jeremy, but in the larger scheme of things it made me think about the way speech patterns get entrained and passed along from generation to generation.

A parent with atrocious grammar passes it along by example to the child, who then grows up to be a parent with atrocious grammar who passes it along to the child, etc.

But!...
 - it goes beyond mere grammar. Beliefs and behaviors function this way, too.
 - it doesn't just operate at the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum. A fascinating study found that the more expensive the car, the less likely its driver is to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk. It's not hard to envision how a parent who is too self-important to bother stopping the BMW for a mere pedestrian passes that self-importance along by example to the child, who then grows up to be a parent too self-important to bother stopping the BMW for a mere pedestrian, etc.
 - I'd be willing to bet it magnifies from one generation to the next, because we tend to partner with people similar to ourselves. (An elitist marries an elitist, they insulate themselves from anything and anyone they consider beneath them, so their children get an even more concentrated version of their elitist example.  ...and/or they inherit hemophilia.)

Gasp!  Clutch your pearls!  Who let in the commoner?!

In a way, the amplification of traits from one generation to the next reminds me of the conservation ecology phenomena of bioaccumulation and biomagnification.  Take the pesticide DDT, for example. It's got a 15 year half life so it hangs out in the environment a long time, and it's fat-soluble so it goes straight into tissue storage instead of being excreted back out after an animal ingests it. Thus, over time, a bottom-feeder accumulates a lot of stored DDT in its body (bioaccumulation).

Then, a fish eats a bunch of those bottom-feeders and all that ingested DDT gets stored in the fish (biomagnification).

A bird of prey eats several of those DDT-loaded fish over time, ultimately ending up with a whopping load of DDT (further biomagnification), which causes the bird's eggs to have thin, calcium-deficient shells that break before the chicks have a chance to hatch, thereby endangering the bird species.

My point in this bio-geek tangent:  Eventually, like DDT, if it goes unchecked by parents and external points of reference, so much ego has accumulated in the family lineage that they inevitably produce offspring who are oblivious to the realities most people face, and a disappointment to the human species in general.

 

With that, I think we finally have a biological explanation for how this happened: