Cognitive Science: An Introduction/Creativity, Planning, and Imagination

Cultural Evolution's Creativity

Cultures evolve over time. This evolution is independent of the genetic evolution that is simultaneously occurring in human beings over time. This cultural evolution results in surprisingly creative solutions to problems.

As we have seen in the previous section, individuals are capable of impressive creative acts. But it turns out that if these innovations are not shared with a social group, over time innovation stagnates. More minds catch more errors, recombine things in more ways, and even benefit from lucky accidents. If the learning from one generation to the next is cut off, due to war or some other disaster, the culture often loses innovations it might have enjoyed for centuries, such as how to make a kayak.

But what sense does it make to talk about a culture being creative independently of the individuals in it? Many cultural practices that are important for survival involve complex patterns of behavior (see the section on how to prepare manioc in the section on How Humans Got So Smart for an example), and the people in the culture often do not know what each step does. No one person came up with the behavioral pattern, and no one person might even understand it. So when we have a complex, effective innovation for something like food preparation, to what creative process do we give credit? The culture itself, over time, evolved the innovation. This is why we can think of a culture as being an entity that can be creative.

Genetic Evolution's Creativity

Just as cultural evolution can produce creative results, solutions to the problems species face can be solved by solutions arising in evolution that strike many of us as creative. An example of this is countershading.