The Social Being Is Imitative
Imitation plays a role in societies analogous to that of heredity in organic life.
From The Laws of Imitation by French sociologist and criminologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904):
And now my readers will realize, perhaps, that the social being, in the degree that he is social, is essentially imitative, and that imitation plays a role in societies analogous to that of heredity in organic life or to that of vibration among inorganic bodies. If this is so, it ought to be admitted, in consequence, that a human invention, by which a new kind of imitation is started or a new series opened—the invention of gunpowder, for example, or windmills, or the Morse telegraph—stands in the same relation to social science as the birth of a new vegetal or mineral species (or, on the hypothesis of a gradual evolution, of each of the slow modifications to which the new species is due), to biology, or as the appearance of a new mode of motion comparable with light or electricity, or the formation of a new substance, to physics or chemistry.
