People cope with challenging climates and ecological contexts by carefully copying others. Instead of Homo Sapiens, or “Man the Knower,” we’re really Homo Imitans.

[..] several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours in the same rhythm upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.