Imitation and culture: what gives?

Abstract

What is the relationship between imitation and culture? This article charts how definitions of imitation have changed in the last century, distinguishes three senses of “culture” used by contemporary evolutionists (Culture1 – Culture3), and summarises current disagreement about the relationship between imitation and culture. I trace the roots of this disagreement to ambiguities in the distinction between imitation and emulation, and to confusion between two projects that motivate research on cultural evolution – the anthropocentric project and the cultural selection project. Combing out these tangles and highlighting research on neonatal imitation in monkeys and humans, I argue that the relationship between imitation and culture goes both ways. Imitation gives cultural evolution an inheritance mechanism for communicative and gestural skills (but not technological skills), and cultural selection yields the cognitive mechanisms that make imitation possible.