There are five monkeys. There's a pole or maybe a ladder and at the top a banana. And of course there's a powerful spray of water.

One of the monkeys starts climbing up the ladder,

it gets hit by the water spray.

Another monkey starts climbing up the ladder,

it gets hit by the water spray. Pretty soon, the other

monkeys, every time they see a monkey getting ready to climb up the ladder, will tackle him, keep him from climbing the ladder. And then, one by

one, the monkeys are replaced. Now the new monkey, the naive monkey, starts trying to climb the ladder and it gets

tackled. One by one, the monkeys are replaced until none of the original wet monkeys, until not one monkey that was present in the face of the bizarre experiment

with the water gun is in the room and yet still the monkeys will keep each other from climbing the ladder.

Hey it's Seth and this is a Kimbo.

That story's not true.

Even scientists who work with primates aren't quite twisted enough to actually have performed that experiment,

but it was in a bestseller called Competing for the Future which came out in

1996 by Gary Hamill and CK Pralad. The thing is they sort of made it up. It was based on an earlier actual experiment

that happened in the 1970s.

The core takeaway that we're supposed to remember is this.

That's the way we do things around here.

That it turns out that the relationships between and among us, what we call

culture, is way stickier and sometimes way more subtle

than we'd like to admit. DNA is permanent. It doesn't really change. What that means is it doesn't matter how long a

giraffe's neck is. It will not get longer if that giraffe keeps stretching for higher leaves.

That's what Lamarck and others believed about evolution, but it's not true.

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