Chapter 7 The Evolutionary Ecology of Creativity John F. Hoffecker Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 USA “Creation is not fashioning something out of nothing, but refa- shioning what already is.” V. Gordon Childe, Society and Knowledge (1956: 124) Creativity is the recombination of informational units into novel arrangements or structures. In a sense, the evolutionary process is “creative”, because it entails recombination of informational units in the form of DNA sequences into a potentially infinite variety of arrange- ments, and these, in turn, may be transformed into organ- isms that exhibit evolutionary “innovations” such as colour vision or feathers (e.g., Nitecki, 1990). Humans are creative with informational units in the form of synaptic connec- tions in the brain and they have the capacity for trans- forming these units into other forms of information, such as a poem, and into structures based on information, such as an armchair (e.g., Dawkins, 1976: 203–215). An emphasis on the “forming of associative elements into new combinations” is evident among the many psychologists (e.g., Mednick, 1962: 220–232) who addressed the issue of creativity during the mid-twentieth century (Kyriacou, 2009: 15–24). But in recent decades, it also became a focal point among linguists, attempting to explain what Noam Chomsky (2002: 55) referred to as “the ordinary creative use of language”. The ability “to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements” (or discrete infinity) has been termed the “core property” of syntactic language (Chomsky, 1988: 169–170; Hauser et al., 2002). The same property may be applied to virtually every sphere of human activity – from cooking recipes to organization of domestic space, from dance movements to polychrome paintings, and from clothing design to a piano concerto (Corballis, 2003; Hoffecker, 2007). An essential characteristic of the structures created by the evolutionary process and the human imagination is hierarchical organization. There are only four DNA base pairs, and they are arranged in groups of three (“codons”), each of which codes for one of twenty amino acids. But varying sequences of amino acids form different proteins, and these in turn are building blocks for more complex structures. Even the comparatively simple prokaryote is based on a highly complex, hierarchically-organized design, and the potential variety of multi-cellular plant and animal life seems infinite. By the same token, human language is “organized like the genetic code – hierarchical, generative, recursive, and virtually limitless with respect to scope of expression” (e.g., Hauser et al., 2002: 1569). 1 Discrete sounds produced by the vocal tract are combined into larger units (words), which are in turn combined into larger units (phrases), which are then combined into larger units (sentences), and so forth. Again, the same principle applies to other spheres of activity, such as making tools or composing music. How did humans acquire their unique powers to creatively combine and recombine informational units in the brain? To begin with, humans gather, store, and share an enormous quantity of non-genetic information. Humans collect so much information that they evolved grotesquely over-sized crania (relative to their body size) to store it (e.g., McHenry, 1994; Klein, 2009), and later had to devise a variety of technologies to store increas- ingly large amounts of it outside the brain (e.g., Donald, 1991: 269–360; Renfrew, 1998). With an estimated 10 billion neurons, each of which is connected to 1000 or more other neurons (Fine, 2008: 27–33), the modern human brain has been described as “the most complex material object in the known universe” (Edelman, 2004: 14–19). Secondly, despite the fact that modern humans seem to collect an extraordinary amount of useless information (also true of a genome) it is apparent that our social and economic life demand substantial data gathering and pro- cessing. Even in small social settings, each person collects an immense quantity of highly detailed information pertaining to relatives, friends, colleagues, enemies, acquaintances, and 1. Experimental research with tamarins, which can be taught a “finite state grammar” that governs arrangements of a small set of elements, but cannot learn “phrase structure grammar”, illustrates the limitations of a non-hierarchically-organized information system (Fitch and Hauser, 2004). Developments in Quaternary Science. Volume 16, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-53821-5.00007-5 ISSN: 1571-0866, Ó 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 89 Origins of Human Innovation and Creativity, First Edition, 2012, 89–102