A monk joins an abbey ready to dedicate his life to copying ancient books by hand. After the first day though, he reports to the head priest. He's concerned that all the monks have been copying from copies made from still more copies. "If someone makes a mistake," he points out. "It would be impossible to detect. Even worse the error would continue to be made." A bit startled, the priest decides that he better check their latest effort against the original which is kept in a vault beneath the abbey. A place only he has access to. Well two days, then three days pass without the priest resurfacing. Finally the new monk decides to see if the old guy's alright. When he gets down there though, he discovers the priest hunched over both a newly copied book and the ancient original text. He is sobbing and by the look of things has been sobbing for a long time. "Father?" the monk whispers. "Oh Lord Jesus," the priest wails. "The word is 'celebrate.'
Chinese whispers, copying books by hand, most of history, almost of all copying in the past was analogue in nature and highly prone to error, ancient texts were obviously even more vulnerable as there was an element of translation going on which was entirely subjective in the mind of the translator. Interestingly nature long long ago invented digital copying, that's how our DNA, genes and Chromosomes replicate, modern digital propagation of data is now incredibly accurate copying a terabyte of data from device A to device B will complete with zero errors these days or at least with all actual errors corrected back to the original using error correction algorithms. In computer systems that accuracy prevents evolution, but in DNA the occasional mistake is what encourages evolution. Human Information for most of history has been highly fluid, and although now it is extraordinarily precisely copied it is also incredibly at risk from loss through erasure as the vast majority of modern storage media have relatively short term archival properties. 21 centuries (more or less) of Chinese whispers represent the totality of current human belief systems, and account for much human misery over that time and much human misery today, scary.
