The Power of Imitation.

In Harmogenics: A Practical Guide to Constant Becoming, I wrote: "The pattern reveals that we don't need everyone to be innovators. We need just enough breakthrough thinkers emerging at the right moments, combined with robust systems for recognizing valuable innovations and spreading them rapidly throughout populations. Imitation does the rest."

Imitation does the rest. That phrase is doing a lot of work. It captures something most people miss about how human history actually operates. We celebrate the innovators—the rare breakthrough thinkers who create something genuinely new. But the real mechanism, the actual power behind human advancement, is what happens after the innovation emerges.

One person figures out how to control fire. Within generations, every human group on the planet (which was pretty much Africa at this time) possesses the technique. One person develops vaccination. Within decades, despite primitive communication systems, it becomes a global practice. The innovator creates one solution. Imitation creates millions of copies, billions of applications, cascading effects that reshape entire civilizations.

Penicillin's antibacterial properties were discovered in 1928. Within twenty years, antibiotics had revolutionized medicine worldwide. The innovation took one brilliant observation. The imitation—the recognition, adoption, refinement, and global distribution—happened at a pace that would have been impossible through any other mechanism.

Today antibiotics are probably over-administered in some parts of the world while other regions need more. Nevertheless, we know exactly what the world was like without vaccines and antibiotics. Hundreds of millions suffered that don’t today.

You don't need special training to imitate what works. You don't need to understand why something works to benefit from imitating it. A farmer in one region sees another farmer's technique producing better yields and copies it, without needing to understand the underlying soil chemistry or plant biology. The capacity to imitate is built into how humans recognize “ah-ha!” and learn.

Fire enabled cooking, which enabled better nutrition, which enabled larger brains, which enabled more sophisticated tool use, which enabled more innovations. The compounding effect of imitation creates acceleration that no individual innovator could produce alone.

This has been going on worldwide for many millennia. This is the perspective to more deeply understand what is happening in the world today.

It operates beyond conscious control. You're imitating right now—speech patterns, ideas, behaviors—without deciding to do so. Cultural transmission through imitation moves faster than genetic evolution by orders of magnitude. What took biological evolution millions of years to accomplish, cultural imitation can spread in generations.

This is the multiplier, the power that transformed us from vulnerable primates into a species that has reshaped the planet. Not because we're all brilliant innovators. Because a few people figure things out, and the rest of us are phenomenally good at recognizing and copying valuable innovations. “Imitation does the rest" means that once someone figures something out, the rest of us don't have to. We just have to be smart enough to recognize a good idea when we see one, then mimic it.

Chimpanzees imitate too. Young chimps watch their mothers use sticks to fish for termites, and they learn the technique. They observe older chimps cracking nuts with stones and copy the behavior. Different chimpanzee populations have different tool-use traditions that get passed down through generations—not through genetic inheritance, but through imitation. They learn grooming rituals, food processing methods, greeting gestures. Some groups wash sweet potatoes in streams while others don't. Young chimps learn alarm calls for different predators, dominance displays, coalition-building tactics. They watch how mothers carry babies and copy infant care practices. Different populations develop different social conventions that distinguish one group from another—all transmitted through observation and copying and certain limited calls and cries and grunts.

Human cooperation is a skill based upon the imitation skill. But imitation also enables coordination in groups of a different nature from merely cooperating.

Chimpanzee groups engage in organized, lethal raids on neighboring groups. The art of battle for a chimp is limited mostly to hooping and hollering and intimidating - all learned by watching others when they were younger. Though killing can occur, most battles are simply fought with dramatic aggressiveness driving away the other. That seems very humanlike to me. The capacity to imitate enables both them and us to transmit not just tool use or foraging techniques, but also systematic violence.

We share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. We diverged from a common ancestor only about six million years ago—a blink in evolutionary time. And both species possess this powerful capacity for imitation that can spread beneficial innovations and destructive behaviors with equal efficiency. Of course, chimpanzees have far fewer innovations but there are past discoveries they imitate, just as we once did.

Imitation is morally neutral. The mechanism doesn't distinguish between copying fire-making and copying warfare. It doesn't care whether you're imitating vaccination techniques or genocide tactics. Imitation is a skill, and like all skills, it amplifies whatever humans choose to do with it.

When I watch chimpanzees learning both grooming and violence through imitation, I see us. I see the same cognitive mechanism operating in our closest living relatives, the same capacity to recognize patterns and copy them, the same ability to transmit complex behaviors across generations without needing to reinvent them each time.

The difference between us and chimpanzees isn't that we have imitation and they don't. The difference is scale and speed. Our capacity for imitation is supercharged—more precise, more flexible, more rapid. We can imitate vastly more complex behaviors. We can copy innovations from people we've never met, transmitted through language and symbolic representation. We can imitate across cultures, across continents, across millennia through written records.

Which means we can spread both beneficial innovations and destructive patterns faster and more thoroughly than any other species on Earth.

This pattern appears throughout our history, though we tend to focus on the wrong part of it. We remember the innovator—the person who figured out the breakthrough. We build statues to them, name buildings after them, tell children to emulate them. But that's not where the transformative power lives. The transformation happens when everyone else starts copying what the innovator created.

We imitate everything. The brilliant and the catastrophic. The life-saving and the destructive. Historically, we've been wildly indiscriminate imitators. We copy whatever seems to work, or whatever the powerful people around us are doing. Sometimes we get it spectacularly right. Sometimes we get it monumentally wrong. We're probably all imitating some non-beneficial behaviors right now.

Harmful consumption patterns. Unsustainable systems. Social structures that create unnecessary suffering. Technologies whose long-term consequences we cannot predict. We're copying all of it with the same enthusiasm we copy beneficial practices. We just don't know which things will prove to be more challenge than benefit yet.

And yet, somehow, we've zig-zagged our way through millions of years. Not in a straight line. Not without massive detours, dead ends, and catastrophic failures that wiped out entire civilizations. But we’re still here and we’re still adapting.

The zig-zag itself is the pattern. A kind of life practice for the human race. We’re going to do a lot of conflicting things all at once. Watch us.

Yet, we imitate enough of the beneficial things—or at least things that keep us alive long enough to try again—that the species survives and advances, even while simultaneously mimicking plenty of things that decultivate people and their cultures. We just need to get it right often enough. Not always. Not even most of the time, necessarily. Just often enough that we don't go extinct before we can try something else.

I marvel at the power of imitation because it's the mechanism that took us from scattered bands of vulnerable primates to a species that has transformed the planet. Because a few people figure things out, and the rest of us are good enough at recognizing and copying valuable innovations.

I worry because it's the same mechanism that spreads catastrophic ideas as readily as beneficial ones. Destructive patterns are as easily imitated as constructive ones. Imitation is not always our best option, but it is still what we do.

We've survived not because we always imitate the right things, but because we've imitated enough of them, often enough, to keep moving despite our mistakes. The trajectory isn't clean or predictable. It's messy, contradictory, sometimes horrifying, sometimes magnificent. The innovation creates the spark. But imitation—indiscriminate, enthusiastic, sometimes brilliantly right and sometimes catastrophically wrong—becomes the fire that has carried humanity to this point.

Whatever happens next won’t be exactly what anyone predicts.

So be ready to imitate something unexpected. Prescient Readiness prompts us to anticipate. Keep your toolbox handy.