Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
14.3.2 Social Systems Can Exhibit Both Generative and Adaptive
Creativity
To be adaptively creative, social systems must be shown to form coherent units to
which creativity is beneficial. Society contains many structures that naturally appear
to us as unified wholes, such as families, organisations and nations, even when the
individual members of these groups might be interchangeable. In certain cases, these
unities act with intention and planning and can be creative in a sense that is more
than simply an accumulation of individual creative acts, through the formation of
structures which incentivise, intensify and exploit individual creativity. In other cir-
cumstances, overlapping with these adaptive scenarios, social groups lack the shared
intention required to view them as adaptive units, but nevertheless act as powerful
generative systems. In such cases it is not possible to view the system's creativity
as serving specific adaptive goals at the level that they are generated. For the groups
concerned, treated as units, the system's creativity may be counter-productive, even
if it involves adaptive creativity at the individual level. From an evolutionary per-
spective, this position is no surprise: we do not generally expect groups to sustain
collective adaptive behaviour, as they can be easily undermined by selfish individ-
uals exploiting the adaptive properties of the group (Wilson
1975
). The important
point for defining generative creativity is that there are properties of the system that
are necessary for an understanding of how new patterns and behaviours emerge, that
are not adaptations by the group, and that go beyond the accumulation of individual
adaptive creativity.
14.3.2.1 The Causes and Effects of Culture
As this implies, understanding adaptive and generative creativity in social systems
depends on understanding the dynamics of cooperation and competition in human
social behaviour. A simple way that adaptive and generative creativity can be seen
to be linked through culture is through the following evolutionary explanation:
1. Cultural behaviour arose due to specific evolutionary adaptations in individuals
such as the ability to imitate successful behaviour, to understand others' goals,
to manipulate behaviour and to be adaptively creative (Barkow et al.
1992
);
2. This leads to:
a. The formation of structured adaptive social units stemming originally from
family groups and simple local alliances, in which a collective interest can
become established (Fisher
1958
,Axelrod
1997
, Maynard Smith and Szath-
máry
1995
, Hamilton
1963
); and
b. The cultural conditions for less cooperative interaction which can have run-
away generative effects, especially under the constraints of structured adaptive
social units (Boyd and Richerson
1985
, Blackmore
1999
).
As with the definitions of generative and adaptive creativity, we can try out state-
ments (2a) and (2b) against specific instances of social behaviour. This theoretical
