Dear Wyoming Weed Wacker,

Plagerize, plagerize, plagerize, I must plagerize or I will die, is more likely the tune of mankind.

Within the context of "borrowing" or "infecting" is the theory of meme (rhymes with beam)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a meme as "a unit of imitation"

The newly "popularized" soft-science or "weird-science" of memetics is based on the rough concept of Darwinism, survival of the fittest, and its application to the "ideas of a culture."

Music is very much a part of any culture. There are patterns, tones, rhythems which can even define a "culture." Paul Simon's GraceLand is and example of extending western music and infusing it with primative nuances....and the patterns have spread. Music plays strongly within the memetic paradym. Sometimes the "spread" of ideas or concepts or musical trends is compared to a "virus" which mutates and infects.

Much as geneticists are tracing DNA, it is possible to trace the roots of musical concepts....but sometimes it takes a genius such as George Gershwin to bring it together....(HG Wells wrote of time/space relationships in the late 1800's but it took the genius of Einstein to quantifiy them into a coherant theory)

There is a research paper The memetic origin of language: modern humans as musical primates which explains a little of this.

It agues that song (musicality, singing capacity) underlies both the evolutionary origin of human language and its development during early childhood. Specifically, language acquisition depends upon a Music Acquiring Device (MAD) which has been doubled into a Language Acquiring Device (LAD) through memetic evolution

Language, they conjecture, owes its existence not to innate language learning competencies, but to innate music-associated ones, which - unlike the competencies hypothesized for language - can be straightforwardly explained to have evolved by natural selection. The ability to sing not only may explain how we came to speak, but may also be a partial answer to some of the very specific sexual and social characteristics so typical for our species and so essential in understanding our recent evolution.

As the learned sage said, "There is nothing new under the sun."