The Beginning of Infinity - By David Deutsch Page 0,196

– rational memes and anti-rational memes – inhibit each other’s replication and the ability of the culture as a whole to propagate itself. Western civilization is in an unstable transitional period between stable, static societies consisting of anti-rational memes and a stable dynamic society consisting of rational memes. Contrary to conventional wisdom, primitive societies are unimaginably unpleasant to live in. Either they are static, and survive only by extinguishing their members’ creativity and breaking their spirits, or they quickly lose their knowledge and disintegrate, and violence takes over. Existing accounts of memes fail to recognize the significance of the rational/anti-rational distinction and hence tend to be implicitly anti-meme. This is tantamount to mistaking Western civilization for a static society, and its citizens for the crushed, pessimistic victims of memes that the members of static societies are.

16

The Evolution of Creativity

What use was creativity?

Of all the countless biological adaptations that have evolved on our planet, creativity is the only one that can produce scientific or mathematical knowledge, art or philosophy. Through the resulting technology and institutions, it has had spectacular physical effects – most noticeably near human habitations, but also further afield: a substantial portion of the Earth’s land area is now used for human purposes. Human choice – itself a product of creativity – determines which other species to exclude and which to tolerate or cultivate, which rivers to divert, which hills to level, and which wildernesses to preserve. In the night sky, a bright, fast-moving spot may well be a space station carrying humans higher and faster than any biological adaptation can carry anything. Or it may be a satellite through which humans communicate across distances that biological communication has never spanned, using phenomena such as radio waves and nuclear reactions, which biology has never harnessed. The unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world.

Nowadays that includes the experience of rapid innovation. By the time you read these words, the computer on which I am writing them will be obsolete: there will be functionally better computers that will require less human effort to build. Other books will have been written, and innovative buildings and other artefacts will be constructed, some of which will be quickly superseded while others will stand for longer than the pyramids have so far. Surprising scientific discoveries will be made, some of which will change the standard textbooks for ever. All these consequences of creativity make for an ever-changing way of life, which is possible only in a long-lived dynamic society – itself a phenomenon that nothing other than creative thought could possibly bring about.

However, as I pointed out in the previous chapter and Chapter 1, it was only recently in the history of our species that creativity has had any of those effects. In prehistoric times it would not have been obvious to a casual observer (say, an explorer from an extraterrestrial civilization) that humans were capable of creative thought at all. It would have seemed that we were doing no more than endlessly repeating the lifestyle to which we were genetically adapted, just like all the other billions of species in the biosphere. Clearly, we were tool-users – but so were many other species. We were communicating using symbolic language – but, again, that was not unusual: even bees do that. We were domesticating other species – but so do ants. Closer observation would have revealed that human languages and the knowledge for human tool use were being transmitted through memes and not genes. That made us fairly unusual, but still not obviously creative: several other species have memes. But what they do not have is the means of improving them other than through random trial and error. Nor are they capable of sustained improvement over many generations. Today, the creativity that humans use to improve ideas is what pre-eminently sets us apart from other species. Yet for most of the time that humans have existed it was not noticeably in use.

Creativity would have been even less noticeable in the predecessor of our species. Yet it must already have been evolving in that species, or ours would never have been the result. In fact the advantage conferred by successive mutations that gave our predecessors’ brains slightly more creativity (or, more precisely, more of the ability that we now think of as creativity) must have been quite large, for by all accounts modern humans evolved from ape-like ancestors very rapidly by gene-evolution standards. Our ancestors must have been continually out-breeding their cousins who