Colombian Children: Mutators

The term meme is very abstract and hard to comprehend when we don’t have an actual example of it. Since nearly everything, a jingle, a word, a picture, and idea is a meme it’s hard to wrap your head around such a broad concept. I understood what a gene was, or at least that’s what I thought, and if the meme was the cultural equivalent of the gene, then I would just have to apply the same characteristics of a gene into an idea. Dawkins explains that perfectly in page 194, but only one sentence brought a tangible example to my mind of what a meme is, more precisely two.

“At first sight, it looks as if memes are not high fidelity replicators at all.” Pg.194

The first things that came to my mind where a jingle and a song that have obstinately fixed themselves in my mind for the last thirteen years or so. The first was the jingle for Colombian margarine “La Fina”, and the later the song “Quando m’Innamoro” made famous in Colombia by The Sandpipers. I thought that if these two had prevailed in the meme pool for such a long time (mid seventies to now), considering faster communication often shortens the lifespan of memes, they must be good memes. There’s only one explanation to that, and it has to do with them no being high fidelity replicators. Both the jingle and the song have not survived in my, my mother’s, father’s, family’s and friends’ mind in their original shapes. The two memes have consistently mutated over the years, but these mutations have assured their survival.

As a child of four I felt sneaky and funny when singing,

“La Fina, la más cochina,

la que se orina en la mesa y cocina.

La Fina a todos nos gusta más,

Sobre todo al perro Nicolás.”

The last part varies between that and “el perro de Tomás”. Evidently this would not be the original jingle, as no sane (or competent for that matter) publicist would advertise their product as being filthy and urinating on the table and the kitchen, much less that this was of the liking of a dog. But the change in the lyrics made the jingle more appealing, funnier. It caused endless laughter in my mother’s kindergarten peers as it did with mine. If it weren’t for this mutation, the meme wouldn’t have prevailed as easily. Ask any Colombian (or Bogotano at least) five year old, and they’ll know the children’s version (ironically more obscene than the adult version) and not the original one.

The exact same situation applies to “Quando m’Innamoro”. The survival of this meme in its original form was very improbable, for it is a song in Italian, making it hard to learn for the Spanish speaking audience. Nevertheless, the melody being apt for any pair of ears stuck on the mind of every adult, teen, and child of the early seventies in Bogota. An ingenious mind decided to adapt the lyrics to ones more attractive, per se.

The original chorus goes:

Quando m'innamoro
Io do tutto il bene
A chi è innamorato di me,
E non c'è nessuno
Che mi può cambiare,
Che mi può staccare da lui.

The meme nevertheless survived in Colombian minds as:

Cuando me enamoro

Voy al inodoro

Y hago lo que tengo que hacer.

Se abren las compuertas

Sale un submarino

Y se oye una gran explosión.

As we tend to stick with what we have learned in our childhood, and because the majority of Colombians do not speak Italian, the later is the meme that has survived in our minds.

These kinds of mutations occur all over the world and in every kind of existing meme. The former are examples of how the replication process is not exact, but that the survival of an idea is the sole justification of its existence. If it weren’t for that change, or that bit, the idea simply would not be present.