Sneeze

It is funny how cultures have beliefs and sayings — such as the idea that when someone sneezes, it is because someone else is talking about them. Or is it thinking about them? I do not remember exactly, nor do I remember where those sayings come from or whether they appear in every culture.

I think they probably do appear in every culture. And we share some of those sayings across different cultures.

That reminds me that there are experiments showing that animals transfer knowledge to their descendants — but also that knowledge is transferred through social contact alone. Those sayings are like pieces of archaeology that reveal links between cultures sharing similar beliefs. We must also remain open to the possibility that both cultures developed those beliefs independently. In that case, without more information to take into account, we have a fifty-fifty split.

We can go much further, though, when we consider that the whole species sneezes — and that other species share the same or similar behaviour. That also leads us to wonder about both possibilities: did the sneezing mechanism develop independently across species, or does it point to a common ancestry?