An excerpt from the book Homo
Imitans by Leandro Herrero:
Homo Imitans is at the core of evolution. We are because we copy. But Homo Imitans did not disappear
when Homo Sapiens took over. Like a dinner guest
reluctant to leave, Homo Imitans stuck around. Social
copying explains so much about our behaviour that sometimes it
makes you wonder if Sapiens really deserves the limelight it
got. When I was a child, the word ‘imitation’ came linked with monkeys.
Indeed, at 2 or 3 weeks old, both chimps and humans start
imitating others. And then the ‘monkey see, monkey do’ really
begins.
There is a whole world of data available on
imitation in animals, but my interest in social infection centres
around the social life of that odd couple in evolution: Sapiens and
Imitans. People have been documenting the social whereabouts of Homo Imitans
for a long time. Some of those accounts belong to
the social sciences and only surface in the media occasionally.
However, some phenomena start in the media and end up
being analyzed or validated by academia.
In the Annex of this book you will find a
library of short summaries of the most relevant cases that
illustrate this social life. The classification in the Annex is
artificial, but deliberate. I grouped them as they tend to appear in public
life (‘clusters of examples’), but there is a great deal of
overlap between the mechanisms involved. I’ll take you on a short
tour later, but, before that, let me set the scene by sharing
some comments on six general and somehow overlapping examples
of our social copying life.
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