Mimicry and innovation,
or what it means to be intelligent
Let’s start with the idea I want to end up with in this section: Imitation and mimicry (which are here treated as synonymous) are the basis of all intentional repetition, reproduction, of all learning, all innovation and as such the basis for all (intelligent) life.
Mimicry or imitation may be defined as the activity of repeating or reproducing some phenomenon or behaviour for whatever purpose.
Defined in this way, imitation and mimicry form the basis of all innovation. Innovation, I shall conclude, cannot proceed without mimicry of some form or another.
At the same time, it is perfectly understandable why imitation and mimicry have acquired a bad name, and it might be worth spending a little time to find out why that might be the case as it will help us perhaps to avoid the traps and get us to think about how we deploy mimicry both fruitfully and effectively in the built environment.
Any activity that is done thoughtlessly, uncritically and without a good understanding of either what exactly is being done, (of the precise elements involved and how they fit together in a working relationship) or why it is being done (to what end and for what benefit), is rightfully looked down upon by those who advise us wisely that we ought to take care about what we do, that we ought to do things, even the most radical things, thoughtfully and with good reason.
That is good advice!
Thinking about what we do, placing everything we do within a carefully constructed and accurate space of implications in order to play the game of giving and asking for reasons well, is the best trick around; it allows us to explore what is possible and useful both sensibly, prudently, rigorously, and innovatively. This trick is the probable reason for our evolutionary success, even though that success, achieved at quite a price, now weighs heavily on us and the rest of the world.
It is certainly true that imitation and mimicry are peculiarly sensitive to thoughtlessness. Observing what someone else does or what some other form of life does, can be imitated without much thought for what in fact is being done or indeed why it is being done.
In this sense thoughtless mimicry is successful —if that is what you want to call it— simply if we roughly master ‘the how’ of what is being done.
This is why —rather unfairly perhaps— we use parrots and monkeys to symbolize this thoughtless kind of mimicry and also call it ‘aping’ or ‘parroting’. Parrots and monkeys supposedly master ‘the how’ of what they mimic to a certain degree but cannot place what they are doing in the critical space of implications and reasons. In this way we say that ‘they do not know what they are doing’. (although we cannot be in any way sure of this. I always worry about comparing ourselves to other animals favourably, we are fundamentally ignorant of other animals and their umwelt)
However, aping and parroting are acknowledged to be important in the learning process. Imitating sounds and movements help us acquire the first outlines of a frame of reference with which we can later build a space of implications and the causal competence that comes with it.
A child watches a bird flapping its wings and begins to flap its arms as if they were wings. It is beginning to learn about flight and about arms and their limitations.
The parents look on adoringly and laugh, but they know the danger; it would be awful if the child actually believes it can fly and jumps off a high tower to demonstrate the skill it thinks it has newly acquired. Flapping arms —parents know better than children— are not much good at working like wings, more is required.
To allow the child to learn through mimicry and gently to acquire and elaborate its space of implications and thus improve its causal competence, parents encourage imitative exploration, but keen to prevent accidents, they are vigilant and exercise a beneficent restrictive control. Play is a good way of learning without the risks.
Part of the problem with the child we just described is that it quite obviously did not master ‘the how’ of what it was imitating very well. Flapping your arms does not even come close to the subtle movements of a seagull’s wings and their implications in terms of the effect those subtle movements of the wing have on the movement of the gull through the air.
Indeed, it is difficult to mimic something well if one does not understand what one is doing or why one is doing it. It has taken years for us to understand the working of a wing. Knowing how such things work, help explain some of the subtle differences between doing something right and doing something wrong.
Understanding something just is knowing exactly how what you are doing fits into a space of implications. And this is the conundrum of learning something when young. Many things we have to learn to do, we have to learn to do through mimicry but without understanding what it is we are in fact doing and why we are doing it.
We are able to mimic long before we are able to play the game of giving and asking for reasons properly. In fact, we spend our whole childhood imitating our elders, our peers as well as the animals and the fictional characters in books and on screen without fully knowing what they are doing or why.
For example, the most difficult thing we need to learn is not doing something. How can you mimic somebody not doing something when they are not doing it? And yet that is precisely what much of our education is necessarily about! Imitating people sitting still and not doing stuff. A child that has not been burnt, cannot know the implications of sticking their hand into a fire. And yet they are being asked to do ‘as we are doing’, namely not sticking our hand into fires. Quite a challenge.
There is another kind of problem with mimicry. This involves doing something for the reason that ‘we always do it like that’ and without truly understanding why we do it that way because we have forgotten the reason or indeed refuse to explore new and possibly better ways of doing things. In this way the activity of repetition or reproduction of a behaviour or phenomenon has become dislocated form the reason for that activity.
Many of our laws simply give us directives how to act or not to act, but do not tell us why this is a good idea. We mimic the behaviour the law prescribes but do not always know why we do so or indeed who benefits.
Much architectural design is susceptible to this kind of mimicry. It is easy to place a window, it is very hard to place a window well, thoughtfully taking into account all the factors that determine whether a window has been placed well.
So, when a particular way of doing has proved itself successful, habit forms and the original reasons might well be forgotten. The difference is often expressed in the reasons we give for doing things. The reason: ‘we do it like that because we always do it like that’ might be a valid reason in very stable situations, but you can see how it might become problematic quite easily in situations where crucial conditions are subject to change. And yet the reason why ‘we always do things like that’, may well be because it works well under the conditions we are familiar with.
There is a further level of thoughtless mimicry which is very common and presents another kind of challenge. We might call this transgressive mimicry.
On this level we do things no longer for the original reason, but for a new and different reason. We have discovered, for example, that the history of ornament, for a large part, is a history in which structural elements with a clear structural purpose have gradually been given a purely decorative role, often when the original mode of construction was superseded by some innovation but also simply because modes of construction suggest nice patterns and systems of order for the ornamental imagination.
In western architecture this is true for the classical and gothic vocabularies, triglyph, the columns, the entablature, the arch and so forth, and more recently even the rivet and truss have achieved ornamental status! Now this isn’t a bad thing, but it does change the playing field. Similarly, many religious practices are of this kind. Not eating pig’s meat, circumcision, some of the practices now collected under the name of Feng Shui, all began with a very practical and sensible purpose but have acquired a different, specifically religious or superstitious purpose.
The mimicry of such practices may or may not still serve their original purpose, but they have also begun to serve the interests of the religion that has ritualized the practice and made it subject to strict rules ensuring strict repetition. Mimicry here becomes an act of loyalty to a faith.
In these ways mimicry has acquired a bad name. But to say that imitation and mimicry is bad, not only threatens to throw away the baby with the bathwater but forces us to become hypocritical. Mimicry is what all of us do, all the time.
Our art imitates life and our lives imitate art. Do you really believe that the early modernists all thought of making white flat-roofed boxes by themselves? That they were all miraculously innovative rather than imitative? Of course not! Memes were circulating and being mimicked, useful innovations are mimicked the minute they are thought of, and rightly so.
Good ideas deserve being mimicked. That is how eveolution with intelligence works. Copyright laws are not there to stop people copying; they are there to stop people copying without acknowledging the inventor and paying for the right to copy the idea.
Modern architecture was just as imitative in its development as historical or traditional architecture was, the modernists just mimicked different memes to the historicists under the banner of progress and modernity. All the progressivist architects under the banner of innovation started imitating the application of flat roofs, white box-like forms and ornament-free design. That was their meme-set.
Alois Riegl, (1858-1905) the famous Viennese art historian of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, describes the evolution of art and technology as a continual process whereby the imitation of life and nature is alternated with the imitation of art. First art (and technology) imitates nature and life, and then it begins to focus upon what it has itself produced and begins to explore its own products from within as it were seeking to express a desired or conceived reality. That is a very convincing and useful model of imitative innovation.
How that works is that we observe something to be the case, for example that butterfly wings never appear to get wet. We think ‘that is useful!’ We then study it, model it, simulate it using different materials and techniques and gradually expand our expertise, discovering different methods and so forth. The innovation that thus has come about through imitating life or nature then becomes the focus for further tinkering and improvement, finding applications in all walks of life.
In other words, imitation and mimicry constitute the foundation of the innovative creatures we are. Through imitation, from the most basic to the most abstract forms of simulation we acquire an understanding of the world and then with the help of conceptualization and reason, we explore that understanding to see what is possible and what, if anything of that which is possible, is also useful to us in some way. The first is called fundamental research, the second is called applied research, both are highly imitative, and both are highly creative, in science and in art.
Here is a last possible trap. If we begin to admire imitation as opposed to innovation, or if we admire innovation as opposed to imitation, we set them up as mutually exclusive opposites, as if someone who innovates does not imitate or indeed as if someone who imitates is not able to innovate. But that is just bad thinking and makes us into the hypocrites I described earlier.
The basis for innovation is imitation in that by mimicking, we acquire an understanding of what is actually happening through simulation, we can then elaborate upon our observations of the behaviour mimicked and the experience of mimicking it, which we can then explore inferentially and empirically in terms of working and possible use.
Once we see what actually happens, what are the elements involved and how they are engaged in a working relationship, we can see what they are able to do and explore their working and explore what that working can be usefully applied to.
That is the basis innovation through mimicking. Biomimicry driven by analogy and metaphor has thankfully brought mimicking and imitation back to the dignified position it should have in our intellectual life. But biomimicry is not a new concept, it has existed since time immemorial, from the moment that a child observed a bird and started flapping its arms. But only when we started thinking about what that could mean, and how we could better simulate the movement of wings could we begin to conceive of us actually flying.
© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.