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in pursuit of a prize they didn't win. Their attempts at individual adaptive creativity
may have failed, and yet inadvertently they contributed to the adaptive creativity of
some larger social group with their various negative results. That is not to say they
were duped or that they acted maladaptively. Many modern professionals, such as
architects and academics, compete against challenging odds to get coveted funding
or commissions. Most find they can reapply their efforts elsewhere, which is in itself
a creative skill.
It seems plausible that this kind of competitive dynamic also has an inherently
self-maintaining structure: those who are successful, and therefore able to impose
greater influence on future generations, may behave in such as way as to reinforce
the principles of competition in which they were successful. A prize winner may
speak in later years of the great social value of the prize. Those who are successful
at working their way up in organisations might be likely to favour the structures that
led to their success, and may try to consolidate them.
In other cases, the emergence of new social structures or the technologies that un-
derpin new social arrangements, innovated by various means, may act to the detri-
ment of individuals. An example is the innovation of agriculture as presented by
Diamond (
1992
), which was a successful social organisation because it enabled the
formation of larger centralised social groups with a greater division of labour, de-
spite worsening the diet of the average individual.
14.3.2.3 Social Groups as Non-adaptive Generators
According to the idea that cultural behaviour attracts baggage—runaway cultural
patterns of behaviour (Boyd and Richerson
1985
)—the same mechanisms of incen-
tivisation can occur in generative creative processes, that is, in situations in which
the collective system is not behaving adaptively in sight of a goal. For example,
whether or not music or the arts are valuable to social groups, individuals adaptively
pursue goals as musicians or artists (Huron
2001
provides a non-Western example),
and in doing so change the world of arts as a whole over time. The change itself
need not necessarily be the result of individual innovation. Although we have a taste
for novelty, artistic behaviour is also constrained by conservative forces: musicians
and artists are compelled to work within a style, and success is by no means pro-
portional to the degree of novelty of the producer (Boden
1990
, Csikszentmihalyi
1996
, Martindale
1990
). Thus it cannot be taken as given that the explanation for
variation in the arts comes down only to individual creative innovation.
A musical fad, for example, is characterised by the explosion of interest in a rad-
ical new style. When that explosion occurs, individuals from diverse backgrounds
may redirect the skills they have nurtured elsewhere to this domain (a derogatory
expression for which is “jumping on the bandwagon”). This results in novel music,
but it is the cultural process—the rapid spread of a fad through a population—that
actually underlies the processes of exploration and combination that contribute to
a creative outcome, not the individual creative capacities of individuals to innovate
