Back in 2005 my daughter Charlotte, then a four-year-old, took part in a study to see how kids stack up mentally against chimpanzees. I wrote about the ambivalent experience of watching her as both a father and a curious science writer in the New York Times. The emerging lesson of the study, led by Yale grad student Derek Lyons, was that children overimitate even though they should know better. Lyons showed the children how to get a toy out of a container, adding in lots of unnecessary tapping of walls and sliding of rods and such. Other scientists had tested chimpanzees on similar contraptions and found that they pay more attention to the basic mechanics of the task at