 Another debate is over the importance of imitation relative to other forms of social learning, both to the transmission and accumulation of culture (Caldwell &amp; Millen 2009; Singh et al. 2021) and to the more creative forms of acquisition of interest to cultural epidemiologists (Sperber 1996; Boyer 2001; Nichols 2004; Morin 2011 [2016]). This issue has attracted the attention of philosophers in part because it intersects with those conceptual issues about fidelity and replication mentioned in  Section 3.1.  Thus, empirical findings in the cognitive science of imitation stand to shed light on conceptual questions about if and when the cultural variants that spread via social transmission can serve as units of selection in cultural evolution, in something analogous to the way that genes serve as units of selection in genetic evolution, in virtue of the fact that they can be replicated with high levels of fidelity (R. Boyd &amp; Richerson 2000; J. Henrich &amp; Boyd 2002; Claidière, Scott-Phillips, &amp; Sperber 2014; Acerbi &amp; Mesoudi 2015; Boudry 2018; Charbonneau 2020; Charbonneau &amp; Bourrat 2021; also see Lloyd 2005 [2020]; Wilkins &amp; Bourrat 2018 [2020]).