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A crowd chasing it proves nothing
The word ape already meant both primate and imitate in Shakespeare's time, and human nature really is deeply imitative: apelike, sheeplike, lemming-like, herd-like. People find it reassuring when others do what they do. There is no wisdom in crowds here: when lots of people try to do something, that is no proof it is valuable.
The Olympics are a little better, because a competitor can figure out pretty quickly whether they are good, which leaves less dead weight loss to society. School is a different case. Many students who later reach Stanford spend junior high and high school holding machine guns against classmates with bows and arrows, so the competition is never parallel, and the question of whether the tournament still makes sense gets sharper in grad school and postdoctoral work.
Why do humans copy each other so much?
French philosopher René Girard argued that people learn what to want by watching what others want. He called it mimetic desire and developed the idea in his 1961 book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In his view, rivals end up wanting the same things because they are watching each other. Girard drew his examples from novels by Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Proust.
Why does the word ape mean to imitate?
The verb to ape, meaning to imitate, appears in English by the 1500s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It comes from the animal, which was long thought of as a mimic of human behavior. The noun and verb senses sat side by side in Shakespeare's era. The same word was applied to people who copied the manners of others.
Why do animals follow the herd?
Biologist W. D. Hamilton published a 1971 paper called Geometry for the Selfish Herd. It showed that an animal reduces its own chance of being picked off by a predator by moving toward its neighbors, since the neighbors then stand between it and the threat. Each animal shifting inward tightens the whole group.
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