4 - Creativity

Can we say the same about creativity? Does the universe get more creative as it evolves? And can this shed any light on why humans find creativity meaningful? Before diving into these difficult questions, it would be good to try and get a handle on what creativity actually is.

Here's one of the world's leading experts on creativity in education, Sir Ken Robinson.

Creativity, as we define it, is the process of having original ideas that have value.

The process of having original ideas that have value.

These three things are important.

It's a process, it's not an event.

Much more often, creative work evolves in the making of it.

It's a conversation between the material and the idea.

And often the idea that we end up with or the piece of work we end up with during the course of a creative process is not the one we had in mind when we started out.

It's an evolutionary process.

When Sir Ken defines creativity as an evolutionary process, he isn't talking about biological evolution.

He's talking about human cultural evolution.

He's talking about the variation, selection and reproduction of original ideas or memes that have value, as opposed to original genes that have value.

We tend to think of culture and biology as two entirely separate things.

We talk about man-made things and natural things as if there's no overlap.

But what the nascent field of cultural evolution tells us is that the mechanism whereby ideas come to spread throughout the human population is exactly the same as the mechanism whereby genes spread throughout a population.

Take a new recipe, for example.

Let's say I write a new recipe for a cheesecake and post it online.

If the recipe's good, people will recommend it to their friends and it will end up spreading.

Then let's say someone comes up with an innovation.

Add a couple more yolks here, remove some cream cheese there, and bingo, they've improved the recipe.

Then the two variants of the recipe will compete with each other, and whichever recipe is tastier will end up spreading more widely.

That is variation and selection at work, pure and simple.

The only difference is that the information about how to make the cheesecake is transmitted from organism to organism via language, as opposed to biological evolution where adaptive information is carried in our DNA.

But cultural evolution is about far more than just cheesecakes.

Can we say the same about creativity? Does the universe get more creative as it evolves? And can this shed any light on why humans find creativity meaningful? Before diving into these difficult questions, it would be good to try and get a handle on what creativity actually is.

Here's one of the world's leading experts on creativity in education, Sir Ken Robinson.

Creativity, as we define it, is the process of having original ideas that have value.

The process of having original ideas that have value.

These three things are important.

It's a process, it's not an event.

Much more often, creative work evolves in the making of it.

It's a conversation between the material and the idea.

And often the idea that we end up with or the piece of work we end up with during the course of a creative process is not the one we had in mind when we started out.

It's an evolutionary process.

When Sir Ken defines creativity as an evolutionary process, he isn't talking about biological evolution.

He's talking about human cultural evolution.

He's talking about the variation, selection and reproduction of original ideas or memes that have value, as opposed to original genes that have value.

We tend to think of culture and biology as two entirely separate things.

We talk about man-made things and natural things as if there's no overlap.

But what the nascent field of cultural evolution tells us is that the mechanism whereby ideas come to spread throughout the human population is exactly the same as the mechanism whereby genes spread throughout a population.

Take a new recipe, for example.

Let's say I write a new recipe for a cheesecake and post it online.

If the recipe's good, people will recommend it to their friends and it will end up spreading.

Then let's say someone comes up with an innovation.

Add a couple more yolks here, remove some cream cheese there, and bingo, they've improved the recipe.

Then the two variants of the recipe will compete with each other, and whichever recipe is tastier will end up spreading more widely.

That is variation and selection at work, pure and simple.

The only difference is that the information about how to make the cheesecake is transmitted from organism to organism via language, as opposed to biological evolution where adaptive information is carried in our DNA.

But cultural evolution is about far more than just cheesecakes.