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and as generatively creative units. I will consider examples from computational cre-
ativity research of modelling social creative systems. I will also consider individual
humans as exhibiting generative as well as adaptive creativity. Finally, I will return
to computational creativity (Sect. 14.4 ) and consider how ideas of generative and
adaptive creativity can be used to support developments in computational creativity
research.
14.2 Generative and Adaptive Creativity
From the broad perspective of poiesis—of how things come about—all the patterns,
structures and behaviours that exist in the world can be taken as evidence of cre-
ativity. This jars with the traditional psychological view of creativity, and implies a
distinction between two varieties, which I will refer to in this chapter as generative
and adaptive . Generative creativity takes an indifferent approach to the problem of
value, it is value-free creativity. In generative creativity, things are not created for a
purpose. Things can come into existence without being created for their value.
The mechanical variation of the spirograph discussed above may be the least
ambiguous, albeit banal, example of generative creativity. Natural evolution is a
more impressive example, but more contentious because the relationship between
nature's creative processes and the production of value is complex. Natural evolution
provides means for lineages of organisms to adapt to their environments, but it is
also responsible for producing both evolutionary challenges and their evolutionary
solutions together in tandem, in the absence of an ultimate goal. Peacocks' tails are
useful to peacocks, and the advancement of their progeny, because they are attractive
to peahens, but this utility is there for the genetic lineages of peacocks and peahens,
it does not serve the process of evolution that produced them .
Value (survival value, the value of sexual attractiveness) is part of the equation
that feeds these evolutionary processes, but the creative processes that produced the
peacock's tail is not, in this author's opinion, an adaptively creative process, as I will
define it below.
This view may yet be mistaken: Gaia theory, for example, implies that there is a
general process of improvement driven by evolution (Lovelock 1979 ). I may also be
underselling the true value of peacocks' tails, in light of the handicap principle (Za-
havi 1975 ) or honest signalling theory (Owings and Morton 1998 ). With these and
other complex issues in evolutionary theory in mind, readers may understandably
take the opposite view that natural evolution is not indifferent to value and is thus
adaptively creative, as defined below. Indeed, the definitions below do not preclude
the possibility of evolutionary adaptation providing examples of adaptive creativity.
The view offered here, though, is that generative creativity is the more predomi-
nant aspect of natural evolution: whilst valuable functions are established during the
evolutionary process, the subject (and beneficiary) of the value—the peacock for
example—is not the creative agent behind the trait, and the process that, if anything,
is the creative agent—an abstract evolutionary mechanism—is a non-entity as far as
“benefits” are concerned.
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