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Put more bluntly, a once barren planet now teems with life. There is no function
that this life was brought into existence to perform. This is generative creativity.
Adaptive creativity is concerned with the process of creating things as an adap-
tive behaviour, perhaps one of a suite of adaptive behaviours, exhibited by a sys-
tem (person, animal, computer, social group, etc.). The least ambiguous example of
adaptive creativity would be everyday problem solving, where an individual finds a
new way to directly improve their life. Basic problem solving is widely observed in
the animal kingdom; a plausible explanation for this is that a suite of cognitive fac-
ulties evolved through selective advantage. Through networks of exchange, humans
can also benefit from inventions that are not directly useful to them. The arts, with
which this chapter is primarily concerned, are more controversial in this respect:
many would question the relationship between art and adaptive behaviour. But the
less controversial association between art and value is reason enough to place artis-
tic creativity in this category. It would seem fair to say that artists generally benefit
from the artworks they produce, even if we are not sure why. Creating something
of value, albeit in a convoluted socially constructed context, is, I will assume, an
adaptive behaviour.
There is a lot to unpack from these preliminary remarks, which I will do through-
out this chapter. To begin, generative creativity and adaptive creativity will be de-
fined as follows:
Generative Creativity : an instance of a system creating new patterns or behaviours
regardless of the benefit to that system. There is an explanation for the creative
outcome, but not a reason.
Adaptive Creativity : an instance of a system creating new patterns or behaviours
to the benefit of that system. The creative outcome can be explained in terms of
its ability to satisfy a function.
Adaptive creativity is here intended to describe the familiar understanding of hu-
man creativity as a cognitive capacity. Generative creativity is its more mysterious
counterpart, and helps extend the scope of creativity to cover a greater set of cre-
ations. Although this duality could be represented simply as novelty with or without
value, the terms are taken to emphasise two essentially different characters that cre-
ativity can assume.
Generative creativity may seem like a distraction from the problems of under-
standing human creativity, and of establishing human-like creativity in computa-
tional systems. The main aim of this chapter is to argue that the duality of genera-
tive and adaptive creativity is instead highly relevant to our understanding of human
creativity, offering a framework with which to understand individual and distributed
social creative processes in a common extensible and future-proof way. The gen-
erative/adaptive divide is argued to be as useful as the human/non-human divide,
and is different in significant ways. This picks up the cause of emphasising how im-
portant the social dimensions of human creativity are, following socially-oriented
theories such as those of Csikszentmihalyi ( 1999 ), but since this cause is already
well established, the more relevant goal is a framework that unifies these elements.
I have briefly discussed natural evolution above, and its ambiguous relationship
to adaptive creativity. A similar discussion will be applied to culture in greater depth.
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