10,000 Years of Human Civilization Explained by One Study

Yeah, this isn't The Onion, bro, this is a real science news source. I actually might be almost serious:

A Yale study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that children imitate the actions of adults who have proven to be untrustworthy, even to the point of excluding obvious solutions to problems.

The effect, called 'over-imitation,' is so powerful that chimpanzees will often solve a given problem more quickly than will a child under its influence.

(This is the second time in two days chimps have proven more intelligent than their naked, big-headed, retarded cousins. The first was when college students were shown to have worse short-term memory than chimps that were "totally not even stoned!")

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It would seem that the infinite plasticity, vastness, and mutability of human cultural content is most fundamentally a pre-rational edifice. In the learning, the baroque prohibitions and proscriptions governing an English coronation rite are qualitatively identical to those governing algebra, or a microtonal scale. They are first abstract—imperatives dictating the terms of a reenactment. Entrance into a system, rational or not, is granted only by fallacy. Only in surrendering blindly to authority may we see the tenets of a system, even a rational one, as necessary, to us, at all. We submit blindly—even if it is with biological blindness to the prejudices wrought in our blood by our inheritance of pleasure or pain—only then may we see what the meaningless actions we have carried out in imitation are even for.

Perhaps this, then, is why children will repeat the actions of adults, even to the detriment of their problem-solving abilities: that the real problems for our species are so far away. They are so mediated by culture. The problem of procuring a mate, for instance, is, except in the most extreme cases, solved by first learning a language. And for this a child must imitate adults in every absurd grammatical, syntactical, and spelling inefficiency we are heir to. This requires tremendous suspension of disbelief, and tremendous good faith. It also is good for explaining how we are able to do so many staggeringly amazing, staggeringly stupid things.

~Alan Bajandas