In today’s world, inventors are our heroes and our saviours – the geniuses who keep the world economy surging forward, who bring us the newest playthings and the latest comforts. We rely on inventors to build a cleaner, happier, more prosperous future. Copycats are a threat to this cheerful vision. Not for nothing do we call them pirates; by cheating and stealing, copiers undermine the system. By profiting from the hard work of others, they reduce the incentive to create. They are a threat to the social order.
But according to a cluster of like-minded researchers, we’ve misunderstood how innovation really works. Throughout human history, innovation – including the technological progress we cherish – has been fuelled and sustained by imitation. Copying is the mighty force that has allowed the human race to move from stone knives to remote-guided drones, from digging sticks to crops that manufacture their own pesticides. Plenty of animals can innovate, but no other species on earth can imitate with the skill and accuracy of a human being. We’re natural-born rip-off artists. To be human is to copy.
This claim emerges from findings in many different kinds of research: field observations of traditional small societies, comparative psychology experiments that compare humans with other primates; computational models that model how civilisations bloom and die. It reveals that imitation allows good ideas to spread quickly and efficiently. By distributing good ideas among many brains, copying preserves them for future generations, allowing them to accumulate.
We think of innovation this way: a lone genius applies massive computational power to a problem, and a flash of insight brings about a world-changing breakthrough. But that’s a myth. Most innovation is mundane, the product of lots of copying and a little bit of creativity.
Researchers dub this iterative process ‘cumulative cultural evolution’: just as organisms evolve via repeated small changes in genes that provide a survival advantage, each human generation makes small modifications to the technology and traditions it inherits. This idea is most clearly articulated by the anthropologist Robert Boyd, of the Santa Fe Institute and Arizona State University, and the biologist and mathematical modeller Peter Richerson, of the University of California Davis. ‘When lots of imitation is mixed with a little bit of individual learning, populations can adapt in ways that outreach the abilities of any individual genius,’ they write in their book Not By Genes Alone(2005).
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