The truth is, humans have the capacity to be creative every day, but in the modern world we often fail to recognize it. About 2 million years ago several groups of small fangless, clawless, hornless, naked upright primates started on a distinctive journey: They creatively collaborated in ways no other creature had. They reshaped stones into tools, explored new foods and ways to get them, ventured into new lands, and slowly remade the world around them. And those small, naked primates, who survived against all odds, are the ancestors of us.
More than , years ago our ancestors learned to work together to hunt collaboratively and creatively, to forage for, and to process, new and more nutritious foods.
By , years ago they tamed fire and used it to change night to day and raw meat to filet mignon. More than , years ago our ancestors painted themselves with pigments and danced.
By 10—15, years ago our ancestors began settling down, creatively reshaping landscapes and the bodies of plants and animals domestication! They created towns, cities, and nations, developed large-scale religions, economies, warfare, and fashioned new types of inequality gender, wealth, class, and ethnicity.
A good look at our evolutionary history shows us that collaborative creativity, for better and for worse, was the key to our success in the past, and holds the key to our future.
The trouble with this strategy, however, is that the other males will rapidly learn what the threshold is, and so will know that they can flout his authority with impunity below it. Note that this strategy is actually observed in nature, in these sorts of circumstances, amongst both apes and human despots. The alpha-male will only punish some transgressions thus minimizing the costs to himself , but it will be unpredictable which ones he will punish, or how frequently.
He thereby provides a powerful incentive against any transgression, while at the same time spreading uncertainty amongst his competitors. And the best way for him to be able to do this is if he can somehow make his responses genuinely random, or protean , in such a way that they cannot be predicted even by himself. In fact Miller makes out a powerful case that alongside the selection pressures building mind-reading abilities in primates and hominids, and developing in tandem with them, there would have been pressures for hominid cognition to become protean in a variety of competitive conditions.
And this might then have manifested itself in various forms of human creativity, and in a valuing of novelty. But what of the time-scales involved in this proposal? He could claim that what happened between the advent of language c. Against this, however, is the point that sexual selection in dispersed groups tends to result in between-group differences in the sexually selected traits, since small initial disparities in the initial preferences become greatly amplified over time.
Note that sexually-selected human bodily traits - such as body hair, as well as breast, buttock and penis size - do vary significantly between different human groups. But there is no evidence of between-group differences in creativity. As a result, what Miller [] actually does is deny the reality of the gap between the first appearance of our species and the emergence of creative behaviors.
He joins those who wish to claim that the appearance of such a gap is a mere artifact of a variety of factors conspiring to hide the evidence of earlier forms of creativity from us. This is certainly a possible position; and he may well turn out to be right.
On the view that I favor, and which has begun to emerge from the above discussion, all of the cognitive pre-requisites for creative thought were in place from the first emergence of anatomically modern humans. What then happened between that time and c. The cognitive pre-requisites for pretence were in place from at least the advent of language, I suggest; but actually engaging in frequent pretend play in childhood served to practice and enhance our imaginative abilities.
Why was this selected for? Not, I suppose, because exercises of imagination are an indicator of protean cognition; but rather because they are partially constitutive of intelligence , in the sense of general problem-solving abilities.
But the selection-pressure can still have been sexual operating equally between the sexes rather than environmental, just as Miller [] argues; or it could just as well have been environmental; or it could have been both of these operating together. On any of these three alternatives there will be no particular problem in explaining the co-evolution of pretend play in dispersed populations.
If the selection pressure for pretend play was sexual, we just have to suppose that early humans had the capacity to discern the connection between imaginative abilities and problem-solving success. This seems perfectly plausible, since everyone is agreed that these humans would have had highly-developed forms of causal understanding, as well as fully modern mind-reading abilities, in addition to language.
Note that one important difference between this proposal and that of Miller [] is that the preference for creative partners need not itself be innate, but results rather from the human capacity to detect the causal connection between creative thinking, on the one hand, and problem-solving success, on the other.
There is therefore no reason to think that small initial differences in this preference between dispersed populations would have been consistent enough to amplify over time, leading to significant differences in creative abilities between different human groups. Consistent with this hypothesis, a large cross-cultural study of patterns of human mate-preference found that in all of the 37 cultures studied, both men and women rated intelligence high amongst the desirable characteristics of a potential mate Buss [].
Alternatively, we might think that pretend play was selected for because those who engaged in it or who engaged in it more subsequently proved more successful in problem solving and so in surviving and reproducing when they reached adulthood. Since what was being enhanced here is a creative problem-solving capacity which can operate across wide variations in environment, the fact of such variation need provide no obstacle to parallel selection.
Or in addition and perhaps most plausibly both reproductive and environmental pressures might have operated at once. What sort of cognitive architecture would have had to be in place , years ago, on this account? On the model of pretence proposed by Nichols and Stich [] , humans would have needed two distinct cognitive elements.
Surely, already-existing working-memory systems could have been co-opted for the job. But the supposition-generator is another matter. This might then be taken to suggest that it would have required some powerful selectional pressure in order for imaginative thinking to become possible. Let me briefly elaborate. There is some reason to think that a basic capacity for this sort of imagination is a by-product of the conceptualizing processes inherent in the various perceptual input-systems.
And these very pathways are then deployed in visual imagination so as to generate quasi-perceptual inputs to the visual system Kosslyn []. Second, there is propositional imagination. This is the capacity to form and consider a propositional representation without commitment to its truth or desirability.
For a productive language system will involve a capacity to construct new sentences, whose contents are as yet neither believed nor desired, which can then serve as objects of reflective consideration of various sorts. In which case a capacity for propositional imagination is likely to have formed a part of the normal human cognitive endowment for about at least the last , years. Of course a mere capacity for creative generation of new sentences or images will not be sufficient for imaginative thinking as we normally understand it.
For there is nothing especially imaginative about generating any-old new sentence or image. But, arguably, we get this attitude for free with imagery and language.
What these faculties give us is the capacity to frame and then consider a possibility represented by a visual image, say, or by a new sentence , without yet endorsing, rejecting, or desiring it.
Once we have this, we effectively have the capacity to suppose. So both pretend play and creative adult thinking would have been possible from around , years ago, I suggest.
Is it possible to say more about the mental mechanism which produces and rewards the activity of supposing? In Carruthers [b] I suggested that children are wired up so as to detect, and then receive intrinsic gratification from, acts of supposition as such.
My suggestion was therefore that it might be the supposition-detector which is damaged in autism, where this detector can be thought of as an element in the normal mind-reading system. The problem with this account, however, is that it attributes precocious mind-reading abilities to normal eighteen month-olds as Nichols and Stich [] correctly point out. There is plenty of evidence that such children have a developing understanding of agency, and of desire and perception as non-intentional relations between agents and objects Wellman []; Gopnik and Melzoff [].
But there is also powerful evidence that children under three do not have any conception of mental states as such, considered as subjective representational states of the agent, which may represent objects partially or incorrectly Wellman []; Perner []. So it seems unlikely that an eighteen month-old infant would be capable of representing its own state of pretending, as such.
For notice that imagination in general seems to be connected up with the appetitive and motivational systems in something very like the way that belief is, as Harris [] demonstrates at length. As is familiar, imagined sex can make you feel sexy, imagined insults can make you angry, imagined food can make your mouth water, and so on.
The satisfactions to be derived from pretend play are essentially the same, I suggest. Suppose that you find telephones fascinating, as young children often do they are of manifest importance to adults, but eighteen month-olds are rarely allowed to use them ; and suppose that you also like to talk to your granny.
Then by imagining that the banana is a telephone, and by representing yourself as making a call, you can gain some of the motivational rewards of the real thing; as you can by imagining that your granny has answered and is there to be talked to. Ditto for imaginary friends, making mud pies, and pretending to be a bird or an airplane. Let me try to substantiate these points in turn.
The first point is easy, since it is well-established that autistic infants lack a normal sense of agency. The child is not actually making a telephone call, of course; so there is nothing in the movements which she makes, as such, to engage with her desire to do so. In order to gain any satisfaction, the child must represent the movements of her finger while she stabs at the banana as an act of dialing; and she must represent the movements involved in putting the banana to her ear as the act of holding a telephone in such a way as to hear and be heard; and so on.
But now it might begin to look as if I have explained too much. For the rewards for pretence as well as the capacity for it now also appear to emerge as a mere by-product of other faculties. In which case the gap which I supposed to exist between the appearance of the capacity for pretence and for creative thought , years ago and the emergence of a regular disposition to engage in it will disappear.
But actually, we still need to explain why children should ever start to pretend in the first place. The above discussion only purported to explain why they should continue to do so once they begin.
This disposition, once activated, would yield its own rewards through the connections between imagination and the motivational system. And its regular activation would serve to practice for adult uses of supposition in theory-building and problem-solving. My account might seem to be subject to at least the following two objections. Seeing how these objections can be answered will lead to further clarification and elaboration of my proposals. For pretending can take us, not just outside of the actual situation, but outside of the real world.
Pretence can be mere fantasy. But if pretence is for enhancing our problem-solving abilities, this might seem puzzling. For such abilities are always exercised in, and tied to the parameters of, some real situation. This objection is relatively easy to answer, however.
For it is no part of my story that creative thinking is only useful in practical reasoning about known aspects of the real world. On the contrary, it is equally valuable in enabling us to generate novel explanations and hypotheses, about the unseen causes of observed events, say.
Such hypotheses are distinguished from fantasy only in being directed at the real world. In other respects they can take us entirely outside of the world of our prior knowledge or experience, just as can fantasy. For example, hunters tracking a wounded animal will often have to generate highly speculative hypotheses in order to interpret the subtle signs they observe - a capacity which bears striking resemblances to the sort of creative thinking which goes on in hypothesis-generation in contemporary science Liebenberg []; Carruthers [].
Is war an inevitable part of the human condition? Harnessing the latest findings in evolution, biology, and archaeology he creates a new synthesis to show that the great drivers of human progress have been creativity and cooperation, and that many of the things we believe about ourselves, from religion to race, are wrong. The first one is that we are bad to the bone, evil to the core. Or at least males are. The really obnoxious people throughout history have not been the ones who, over the long term, have influenced us the most.
The second misconception is that males and females are radically different in their sexuality and gender. The whole idea that there are these single things, like aggression or sex differences, which explain the complex evolution of what it means to be human, is just too simple.
The first thing to do is to look at the archaeological and fossil evidence. What we see is that about 10,, years ago we start to find examples of large scale or at least coordinated, lethal group violence, which we call war. But warfare today is not just about two groups of people fighting one another. That kind of warfare—large scale, intergroup violence around ideas, ideologies, money, and resources—shows up in the last 10, years more and more frequently because we have more stuff to fight over and more opportunities to do so.
If you were to take a slice of time at this moment, the vast majority of the 7. The ability to imagine and to take that imagination and make it into reality is one of the things that is really distinctive about humans. And there is no better way to flex that creativity muscle than to do art, be exposed to art, and to think about art.
What President Trump will be doing by taking away the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for Humanities and cutting public access to art, is to rob humanity of imagination and creativity and hobble us in our capacity to get along and make a difference in the world. We know that 85, years ago, in southern Africa, our ancestors were carving on ostrich eggshells. Twenty thousand years earlier than that, they were drilling holes in small shells and wearing them around their necks.
One hundred thousand years before that, they were crumbling ochre and rubbing it on their bodies. Five hundred thousand years before that, half a million years ago, they were making tools that were incredibly beautiful and more symmetrical and aesthetic than they had to be to do their jobs. Art is very deep in human history. An important distinction has to be made here. But what is new is big, institutionalized, organized structures. Every poet has her muse; every engineer, an architect; every politician, a constituency.
The way we work with others to get inspiration varies widely, but successful collaboration is inseparable from imagination, and has brought us all manner of useful things from knives and hot meals to iPhones and interstellar spacecraft. Fuentes is not the only one who has put forward this claim on the power of creativity.
Coming from a very different perspective is Teresa M.
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