The Creative Process of Cultural Evolution

Abstract

This chapter explores how we can better understand culture by understanding the creative processes that fuel it, and better understand creativity by examining it from its cultural context. First, it summarizes attempts to develop a scientific framework for how culture evolves, and it explores what these frameworks imply for the role of creativity in cultural evolution. Next it examines how questions about the relationship between creativity and cultural evolution have been addressed using an agent-based model in which neural network-based agents collectively generate increasingly fit ideas by building on previous ideas and imitating neighbors’ ideas. Finally, it outlines studies of how creative outputs are influenced, in perhaps unexpected ways, by other ideas and individuals, and how individual creative styles “peek through” cultural outputs in different domains.

Autocatalytic networks in cognition and the origin of culture

“…Donald's concept of STR bears some resemblance to the suggestion by Hauser et al (2002) that what distinguishes human cognition from that of other species is the capacity for recursion (Corballis, 2011), as well as the concepts of relational reinterpretation by Penn et al (2008) and of 'merge' by Chomsky (2012) (for an overview, see (Gabora, 2018a)). What these theories have in common is that they focus not on abilities in a particular domain (such as social or technical abilities) but on a cognitive trait that cuts across domains.…”

The elephant in the room: What matters cognitively in cumulative technological culture

“…Others have argued that the general cognitive ability underlying cumulative culture was the onset of a self-triggered recall and rehearsal loop (Donald 1991), relational reinterpretation (Penn et al 2008b), conceptual fluidity (Mithen 1996b), conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2008), or something Chomsky (2008) called "merge." Our own two-step theory attributes cumulative culture to the onset of representational redescription followed by the capacity to shift between the convergent and divergent modes of thought, culminating in the emergence of an integrated internal model of the world (Gabora 2018;Smith et al 2018). Thus, although Osiurak and Reynaud (O&R) position their technical-reasoning theory as the only alternative to social explanations for cumulative technological culture, they fail to consider theories that attribute it to the onset of a more general cognitive ability.…”

Creativity as emulation: the cultural basis of creative cognition

“…Emulation might provide a psychological basis for it. Creativity is not merely a component of cultural evolution, but a catalyst for the emergence culture to begin with (Donald, 1991;Fogarty et al, 2015;Gabora, 2018). Hence, it makes sense to think of a co-evolutionary relationship between creativity and culture.…”