See also the monkey ladder experiment: https://www.wisdompills.com/monkey-ladder/ - The behaviour is, of course, not as stupid as it seems. Humans are especially prone to copy extra steps from others that don't seem to add anything.

But sometimes, when you skip over the "useless" steps while preparing a certain kind of food (e.g. for some manioc variant), you may slowly poison yourself over the years. Also, remember to always brush your teeth.

I like the hate example. In the same way that another poster mentioned local minima and metastable solutions, I see that unfolding in the current socio-political landscape. There is a metastable solution we're currently refining. That memeplex becomes an increasingly difficult well from which to escape. In a sense there may even be an ideological escape velocity to some of these memetics attractors.

On broader scales, the dominant mode of production is a metastable state. In the same way we might experience false vaccum decay, the current mode of production may undergo the same kind of spontaneous transformation. What's even more interesting is that it has done this at least three times already.