Why the
Creative Process is Not Darwinian
Commentary on
‘The Creative Process in Picasso’s Guernica Sketches:
Monotonic Improvements versus Nonmonotonic
Variants’
by Dean Keith Simonton
Liane Gabora
University of
British Columbia
Address for Correspondence:
L. Gabora
University of British
Columbia
Okanagan campus, 3333
University Way
Kelowna BC, V1V 1V7, CANADA
email:
liane.gabora[at]ubc.ca
Phone: (250)
807-9849
Fax:
(250) 470-6001
ABSTRACT
Simonton (2006) makes the unwarranted assumption that
nonmonotonicity supports a Darwinian view of creativity. Darwin’s theory of
natural selection was motivated by a paradox that has no equivalent in creative
thought: the paradox of how change accumulates when acquired traits are not
inherited. To describe a process of cumulative change in which acquired traits
are retained is outside of the scope of the theory of natural selection. Even
the early evolution of life itself (prior to genetically mediated template replication)
cannot be described by natural selection. Specifically, natural selection
cannot describe change of state that involves horizontal (Lamarckian) exchange,
or occurs through interaction with an incompletely specified context. It cannot
describe change wherein variants are evaluated sequentially, and wherein this
evaluation can itself change the state space and/or fitness function, because
no two variants are ever evaluated according to the same selection criterion. Concerns
are also raised as to the methodology used in Simonton’s study.
There
are few individuals whose contribution to the field of creativity studies is
remotely comparable to that of Dean Keith Simonton. His extensive body of work
commands and deserves the highest admiration. The single exception to this, in
my opinion, is his espousal of a Darwinian view of creativity. In this
commentary I show that the flaws in this theory of creativity are so serious
that it is not only unlikely, it is impossible.
The
goal of Simonton’s (2006) paper is to provide experimental evidence for a
Darwinian theory of creativity, which he summarizes as follows:
According to this theory,
creativity requires the generation of a certain amount of “blind” ideational
variants which are then selected for development into the finished
product. These variations are
blind in the sense that the creator has no subjective certainty about whether
any particular variant represents progress toward the goal rather than retrogression
from or diversion away from the goal.
As a consequence, the creator must rely on an essentially
trial-and-error process that produces more ideas than will ever be used, and
will do so in a manner that exhibits no linear or at least no monotonic
movement toward the final product.
There
are two issues here. First is the question of whether this is an accurate
portrayal of the creative process. A second, more fundamental question is: even
if this were an accurate portrayal of the creative process, would that imply
that the process is Darwinian? It would take a great deal to convince me that
the first is true simply because it runs counter to my own experience, and
counter to the results of some brilliant experiments on the intuitive
antecedents of insight (Bowers et al., 1995). An external manifestation of an
unfinished creative idea (such as one of Picasso’s sketches for Guernica) is
not just the tip of an iceberg, but a ripple made by the tip of an iceberg, and
extrapolating from such ripples to the underlying creative enterprise is bound
to be dangerous. Undoubtedly as Picasso made externally visible progress on one
part of the painting, he was subconsciously busy with another. Thus a lack of
continuity in the creative work need not reflect a lack of progressive honing
in the internal creative process. But this somewhat ‘murky’ issue is irrelevant
if no matter what the outcome of Simonton’s experiment it would not support the
theory as claimed. And that I can show that without a doubt is the case. Thus
the matters addressed in this commentary are technical in nature.
The
commentary begins by demonstrating that Darwin’s theory was motivated by a
paradox that has no equivalent in creative thought: the paradox of how change
accumulates when acquired traits are not inherited. To describe a process of cumulative
change in which acquired traits are retained is beyond the scope of the theory
of natural selection. Even the early evolution of life itself was not
Darwinian, and cannot be described by the theory of natural selection (Gabora,
2006b; Vetsigian et al., 2006). This is followed by a summary of the factors
that make natural selection inapplicable to the process by which creative ideas
are conceived (elaborated in detail in Gabora, 2005, 2006a) with implications
drawn for Simonton’s experiment, and his assumption that nonmonotonic variation
is indicative of a Darwinian mode of change. Specifically, Finally minor
critiques of the experimental methodology are mentioned.
What necessitated the theory
of natural selection, an intricate theory of population-level change, is that acquired traits are not inherited from parent
to offspring at the individual level in
biological lineages. If a cat bites off a rat’s tail, it is not the case that
the rat’s offspring are tail-less. If change keeps getting discarded, how does
change accumulate? This is the paradox that biologists faced, and it is this
that provided the backdrop against which Darwin’s theory solved a pressing
dilemma. But there is no such paradox for creativity. Indeed in all domains other than biology, explanation of change is straightforward. When an
entity undergoes a change of state, say from p(0) to p(1), the change is retained. One
could say it is ‘inherited’ by the future states of the entity, p(2), p(3) and so forth. The entity does not spontaneously revert back to p(0). For example, if an asteroid collides into a planet, it does not
revert back to the state of having not collided into the planet. Similarly,
once someone came along with the idea of putting a handle on a cup, cups with
handles were here to stay. Since creative ideas can retain acquired characteristics, creativity researchers do not
share the biologist’s need to account for how change occurs despite a discarding
of acquired traits each generation. Simonton seeks to borrow a solution to a
problem in one field and apply it to another field where that problem does not
exist. He wishes to apply natural selection to creativity on the grounds that
it is a nonmonotonic process involving trial and error. But it was not this
that fueled the theory of natural selection. It was that change (monotonic or
not) occurs despite the loss of acquired
characteristics; i.e. despite (one could say)
the malfunctioning of the normal mechanism of change. Thus if creative thought
exhibits nonmonotonic change, it does not follow that it does so because it is
Darwinian. A more parsimonious explanation is that nonmonotonicity can arise
not only through natural selection occurring at the population level but
also through processes occurring at the level of a
single entity (such as an unfolding idea) where change is straightforwardly
retained.
The
problem is not just that when acquired characteristics are retained it is not
necessary to look to the population level. It is
more serious; it is that natural selection is no longer applicable. The theory of natural selection theory
is not merely vague and descriptive; it has been rendered in precise
mathematical terms. For natural selection to be applicable to
a process, there must be no inheritance of acquired characteristics (or at
least it be negligible compared to change due to differential replication of
individuals with heritable variation competing for scarce resources). The
periodic ‘backtracking’ to a previous state observed in biology when one member
of a lineage gives birth to another arises because organisms are von Neumann
self-replicating automata. Self-replicating automata use a template, a set of
instructions encoded in DNA or RNA for how to make a copy of itself. This
self-assembly code is both actively transcribed to produce a new individual,
and passively copied to ensure that the new individual can itself reproduce.
The new individual may change, but the passively copied code within does not.
However
creative thoughts do not possess such a code, are not self-replicating
automata, and thus retain acquired change. In fact this is also true of early
life itself (Gabora, 2006b; Vetsigian et al., 2006). The probability of a
self-assembly code such as the genetic code arising spontaneously is
exceedingly small; Hoyle infamously compared it to the probability that a
tornado blowing through a junkyard would assemble a Boeing 747 (Hoyle, 1981).
The implausibility of the spontaneous appearance of a self-assembly code has
led to the wide-spread acceptance of metabolism first theories, according to which life began with an ensemble of simple,
collectively replicating molecules, such as an autocatalytically closedi set
of polymers (Bollobas, 2001; Bollobas & Rasmussen, 1989;
Dyson, 1982, 1985; Kauffman, 1993; Morowitz, 1992; Wäechtershäeuser, 1992;
Weber, 2000; Williams & Frausto da Silva, 1999, 2002, 2003). Self-replication is
not all-at-once (as it is with a self-assembly code), but piecemeal. Although no one molecule replicates
itself, the whole is regenerated through the interactions and transformations
of its parts. The ensemble is therefore said to be autopoietic (Maturana and Varela
1980). Genetically
mediated template replication, and thus vertical (as opposed to horizontal)
descent emerged subsequently
from the dynamics of these molecular systems (Gabora, 2006;
Vetsigian et al., 2006). As
Vetsigian et al. put it, “the evolutionary process that gave rise to
translation [the process by which the genetic code is interpreted to make
proteins that make up an organism] is undoubtedly non-Darwinian…. A Darwinian
transition corresponds to a state of affaires when sufficient complexity has
arisen that the [code] is incapable of tolerating ambiguity, and so there is a
distinct change in the nature of the evolutionary dynamics—to vertical
descent.” As discussed in detail elsewhere (Gabora, 2005) due to the fact that
horizontal change generally entails interaction with an incompletely specified
context, not only does natural selection on apply to its description, but a
different mathematics is needed.
Thus we have (at least) two means by which
entities evolve. The one with which we are more familiar is the vertical,
highly constrained process of natural selection, which uses a self-assembly
code. The one that preceded it, and which has only recently been recognized as
a viable means of evolving, is a more haphazard process involving horizontal
exchange amongst autopoietic structures. Computer
simulations indicate that the
non-Darwinian process by which early life evolved exhibited much more
nonmonotonic variation than the Darwinian process that followed (Vetsigian
et al., 2006). Therefore one
cannot conclude that creative thought is Darwinian because it exhibits
nonmonotonic variation. Nonmonotonic change is not a litmus test
for Darwinism. Indeed there is nothing in natural selection that precludes
monotonic change. A genetic algorithm, for example, can exhibit monotonic
change.
The Darwinian view of creativity
presupposes that an idea is ‘stored’ in memory waiting to be selected out from
amongst a set of others. But as Edelman forcefully points out, human memory
works very different from a computer; one does not retrieve an item from memory
so much as reconstruct it (Edelman, 2000, 2006). Its role in thought is participatory (Gabora & Aerts,
2002; Rosch, 1999). An item in memory is never re-experienced in exactly the form
it was first experienced. It is colored, however subtly, by what we have
experienced in the meantime, re-assembled spontaneously in a way that relates
to the task at hand, and if its relevance is unclear it is creatively redescribed (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992)
from different real or imagined perspectives or contexts until it comes into
focus. One innovates not by randomly choosing
amongst predefined alternatives but by thinking through how something could
work. The best a Darwinian approach could hope for is to account for novelty
that is both randomly generated and restricted to the same set of properties as
what came before, just perhaps to a greater or lesser degree. It cannot account
for novelty that is generated strategically, or that makes use of our associative
capacities, and it cannot account for the invention of items with new properties. As Boden (1990) would put it, they can account for
solutions that explore new areas of an existing state space, but not those that
break out of a pre-existing conceptual space. Thus it cannot account for the
sort of novelty generated by creative minds.
Simonton
claims that his critics suffer from the misconception that “the theory only
mandates the existence of two or more distinguishable variations that represent
alternative directions for future development of an incipient idea (cf. natural
selection operating on just two alleles). Hence, a series of sketches of a
particular figure only has to contain a minimum of two rival conceptions to be
considered part of a Darwinian process.” But elsewhere he admits that the
ideation process is sequential, one thought at a time:
Thus, the artist sometimes has false negatives, where he neglects to
pursue an idea that will figure prominently in the final painting, and other
times he will have false positives where he will temporarily pursue an idea
that ultimately gets him nowhere. Whether he goes in the right or wrong
direction can be ascribed to chance rather than to intelligence or expertise.
Occasionally the artist guesses right while on other occasions he fruitlessly
pursues a less lucky hunch. Progress toward the final outcome can thus be
described as a sequence of nonmonotonic variants.
The
fact that these thoughts occur “as a sequence” disqualifies them as candidates
for selection theory. This is incompatible with
selection theory because it presupposes requires multiple, distinct,
simultaneously-actualized states. As Okasha (2001) notes, in attempting to
apply selection theory to a temporal sequence, whether something gets selected
or not depends arbitrarily on how you break up the sequence. But there is an
even deeper problem. Since each thought contributes to the context in which the
next is evaluated, never do two thoughts undergo the same ‘selective pressure’.
For example, the process of generating one sketch affected how Picasso
continued from thereon to generate others. Since each successive thought can
alter the fitness function itself, they are not evaluated with respect to the
same fitness function, and thus there is no basis for selecting amongst them.
This yet another reason why creative thought is a process of honing, not
selecting.
Even
if the hypothesis that creativity is Darwinian were feasible, and even if
findings of nonmonotonicity provided more support for this hypothesis than for
alternatives, the conclusions of this study would still be questionable because
of the methodology used. I was asked by the author to carry out the task of
ordering the drawings, but instead of doing it myself I gave it to the students
of my Psychology of Creativity class. They did it together, dividing themselves
into groups and each group ordering a bundle of sketches, then joining another
group and re-ordering the combined bundles, and so forth, until the entire
packet of sketches was ordered. The procedure spilled over the class time, in
the end taking well over an hour to complete. I was informed by Simonton that
the data provided by my class were not used, in part because they arrived after
his paper had been submitted, and in part because the class had carried out the
task together as a group. These are valid reasons not to include the data. My
critique has nothing to do with the integrity of experimenter or the procedure
used in an ideal sense but rather with the down to earth fact that even with
the best of initial intentions one eventually loses enthusiasm for the task of
trying to perfectly order 79 different sketches. After observing students carry
out the task of ordering this mountain of drawings, one must ask whether the
lack of monotonicity reflects simply a desire to finally be finished with what
may appear to be a seemingly endless (not to mention seemingly pointless) task.
If the pile had consisted of only 10 or 15 sketches I am certain every effort
would have been made to ensure that they were in the best possible order. But
with 79, after a certain point one admittedly feels that one has put in
sufficient time on the task and must move on to other things, and send the pile
as it stands. It must be conceded that as the size of the pile increases, less
effort surely goes into ensuring the best possible position for any sketch, and
it must also be conceded that the number of sketches that had to be ordered in
this experiment would test the patience of all but the most devoted sketch
orderers. The fact that only five subjects including the experimenter himself
(plus my class) could be convinced to complete the task is telling in this
respect.
Simonton
concludes his paper by claiming “The above results strongly support the
contention that the creative process underlying Picasso’s Guernica was accurately portrayed as Darwinian.” This is false. He has
provided evidence that the external manifestations of a creative process
exhibit a pattern of change that is nonmonotonic. But that does not mean that
the creative process is Darwinian, for it violates the conditions that make
natural selection applicable to its description. Natural selection was an
ingenious solution to a specific problem. The ingenuity of Darwin’s approach
was to look for a mechanism of change at the level of the population rather
than the individual, given that acquired change at the individual level is
discarded each generation. It is not applicable to processes where this is not
the case. That said, the goal of finding a general framework for understanding
and analyzing creative change is worthy. It is hoped that, in Simonton’s words,
this false positive, this temporarily pursuit an idea that ultimately goes
nowhere, is a stepping stone toward more promising theories of how the creative
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