Mullerian memes

[bascule]

Well, in my typical aloof ruminations I was thinking about expressions we teach parrots and other birds which can mimic human speech, and I was thinking about the birds who were able to pick up these phrases as they waited to be bought in a pet store. I mean, clearly these birds get enough exposure to the same phrases over and over that they are able to learn them. You know, the ones like "Polly wanna cracker?" and "Pretty bird." They're memes which are successful because they're a sort of universally agreed upon set of nonsense phrases between both humans and birds so that people repeat often enough for the birds to pick them up, and do so because they have so often have success at getting responses from the birds with these phrases. Wouldn't this be an example of memetic Mullerian mimicry? I mean, that's all it really is right, a cospecies symbiosis which leverages an evolutionary advantage, although in this case it's for the meme.

[zyncod]

Well, the birds do say the "meme" (God, how I hate to use that word, even in quotation marks), but it's not Mullerian mimicry. Nobody is mistaking the birds for humans- it's just a behavior that is propagated because humans think it's cute. Like getting dogs to sit for treats. And it's not symbiosis unless having a bird that says things gets you laid more often.

[Mokele]

Well, I wouldn't say it's mimicry in the sense of mullerian or batesian, since neither meme has any sort of "defense" against it's removal, nor anything that could be analogized to "warning colors".

 

At best, I'd say it'd be memic co-evolution and symbiosis, though even that analogy falls a bit flat.

 

Mokele