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and matter to be employed for reproduction. Through feedback loops, organisms
construct their own niches, passively and actively organising their environment,
modifying the selection pressures acting on themselves, their progeny, and their
cohabiters (Odling-Smee et al.
2003
). The moulding of self-selection pressures by
a population shifts the constraints within which future generations are introduced.
Hence, ecosystems are capable of producing an endless variety of generative frame-
works. New species too, their behaviours and constitutions, define niches that are
themselves novel generative frameworks—they are creative.
Dancing Bowerbirds, Painting Elephants and Primate Typists.
Under what
circumstances is the introduction of a specific member of a species, an organism,
creative? Male bowerbirds gather collections of bones, glass, pebbles, shells, fruit,
plastic and metal scraps from their environment, and arrange them to attract females
(Borgia
1995
). They perform a mating dance within a specially prepared display
court. The characteristics of an individual's dance or artefact display are specific to
the species, but also to the capabilities and, apparently, the tastes of the individual.
The creativity of “elephant-artists” appears similarly individualistic:
After I have handed the loaded paintbrush to [the elephants], they proceed to paint in their
own distinctive style, with delicate strokes or broad ones, gently dabbing the bristles on the
paper or with a sweeping flourish, vertical lines or arcs and loops, ponderously or rapidly
and so on. No two artists have the same style.
(Weesatchanam
2006
)
Novel patterns are apparent in these elephant and bowerbird activities but it ap-
pears unlikely that they operate within self-made frameworks that they may trans-
form. Nevertheless, these organisms are potential sources of pattern, and each is a
unique generative framework. If they can generate unique or improbable patterns, a
novel style, then
their birth
was a creative event. By this measure, the bowerbirds
and painting elephants are not individually creative but their introduction within the
context of an ecosystem was.
8
Humans of course have the ability to consciously assess their work, to recognise
the frameworks they employ in the production of art, and to escape these into cre-
ative territory. Usually it is assumed that other animals do not have this high-level
mental faculty.
Another test case for assessing creativity is the keyboard-punching army of mon-
keys. It has been proposed that after typing randomly for a time the monkeys would
have made copies of a number of previously authored texts (Borel
1913
). In this
exceedingly unlikely event, the monkeys are not creative by our definition, as we
would intuitively hope! Not even if by chance the monkeys had typed up a sin-
gle original sonnet would they be creative since many other pre-existing generative
8
In this sense too, the birth of a new human, even one who is unable to introduce new frameworks,
is a creative event. Actually, it has been argued that humans, like bowerbirds, produce artistic works
as an evolutionarily adaptive way to attract mates (Miller
2001
). This theory is one of several,
however, and is not universally accepted (Carroll
2007
).
