The Meme Machine

THE BIG BRAIN 81
basic tasks of imitation, such as relating observed facial expressions or actions to
one’s own, but we will need to know a lot more about how imitation is done
before we can guess what to look for.
If these predictions turn out to be right they will confirm the suggestion that
imitation is an enormously demanding task, and that it takes a large brain to be
able to do it. I would further predict that many aspects of language and thought
will turn out to be best understood as by-products of our brains’ ability to select
which aspects of the world to imitate. However, until more research on
imitation is carried out, I can only speculate and say this – if being good at
imitation requires a big brain then the processes described above can explain it.
These are: selection for imitation, selection for imitating the best imitators,
selection for mating with the best imitators, and (possibly) memetic sexual
selection. Once early hominids achieved imitation the second replicator was
born and these processes began to drive the increase in brain size. The
enormous human brain has been created by the memes,