There was once a girl (let’s call her Yvette) who did not want to spin thread. This insolence infuriated her mother, who beat Yvette until she cried. As it happens, the queen was passing by just at that moment and heard the cries. She entered the house and demanded to know what was going on. The mother lied and said that Yvette was only crying because all she wanted to do was spin, but lacked the raw material on account of her poverty. This was good news to the queen, who could procure all the flax in the world but was in need of spinners. She thus decided to bring Yvette to her castle, basically sending her into child labor. Well, I guess it beats child abuse.
Yvette was immediately put to work. There was enough flax to fill three enormous rooms, and she was given three days. In return, the queen promised that Yvette could marry the prince if she completed the task. There was only one problem: Yvette couldn’t actually spin. So, she just cried for three days. This insolence infuriated the queen, who I guess must have had a quota to fill and wasn’t getting a return on her child labor investment. Yvette needed an explanation for her poor productivity. She lied and said that the reason she couldn’t spin was because she missed her mother. If this were true, it might be the first recorded incidence of Stockholm syndrome. Anyway, the queen sympathized and decided to give Yvette a second chance, but in no way attempted to alleviate Yvette’s supposed longing for her mother. Of course, Yvette still could not spin, and so was about ready to start crying again. Suddenly, three old women appeared out of nowhere. One with a big foot, one with big lips and one with a big thumb. They promised to spin all the flax on the condition that they be invited to Yvette’s wedding, posing as her aunts, and sit with her at the main table. Yvette agreed and the flax was spun. The queen was very pleased with the results and, as promised, arranged the wedding between Yvette and the prince.
On the day in question, the prince asked the three women about their unusual qualities. From experience, I can tell you that you should never draw attention to any physical features on a woman, no matter how well intended. Shockingly, the three spinners did not find this offensive at all, and calmly replied that the big foot was for treading, the big lips were for licking the thread, and the big thumb was for twisting the thread. This new-found information “alarmed” the prince. He therefore decreed that his wife would never again have to spin. The end.
This may seem like an abrupt and bizarre ending, but it tells us something fascinating. What we’ve learned is that the prince was a Lamarckian. Not in name, of course, since this story predates Lamarck, but in theory. Lamarck was a biologist who incorrectly proposed that evolution occurs by inheritance of acquired traits. In other words, according to this hypothesis, our characteristics are not innate, but rather shaped by our environment and passed on to our offspring afterwards. For example, this would mean that giraffes have long necks, not because those giraffes with inherently longer necks have an advantage over those with shorter necks and outcompete and outbreed them, but because they stretch their necks while reaching for food, and then have offspring with longer necks as a result. Charles Darwin’s great insight was that individuals across a population differ in their inborn traits, and that natural selection acts upon those differences. So, basically, you won’t have a ripped baby just because you go to the gym. Therefore, we can deduce that the reason the prince was so upset by seeing the enlarged body parts of the spinners was that he assumed that these traits were a Lamarckian adaptation, and that if Yvette kept spinning she too would acquire these very same traits and pass them on to his children. However, all this being said, I think the moral of this story is much more crass: If you’re incompetent but wish to succeed in life, lie on your job application, fake it until you make it, get others to do the work for you and then take credit for it. Seems about right…
Sorobetea 