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successful solutions to an artistic goal. Individuals may actually be acting not inno-
vatively, but identically and predictably: applying existing habits and background
knowledge to a new domain, and engaging in something of a lottery over the fu-
ture direction of musical style. Indeed, musical change over decades may be less to
do with innovation than to do with waves of individuals, generations, restructuring
musical relevance according to their own world view, involving a combination of
group collaboration and within-group and between-group competition. Hargreaves
(
1986
) considers such fashion cycles in the social psychology of music. Fads offer
an indication of how creative change at the social level can occur as a combinatoric
process built on gradual mutation and simple individual behaviour, and can only be
understood at that level. The negative connotations of a fad as ephemeral and ulti-
mately inconsequential emphasise the generatively creative nature of this process: a
fad satisfies no goal at the level on which it occurs, although many individuals may
be satisfying individual goals in the making of that process.
The nature of the arts both with respect to adaptive human social behaviour, and
as a collective dynamical system, is becoming better understood, but sociologists
and anthropologists have struggled with good reason to develop a solid theoretical
framework for such processes, and we still have far to go before we can disentangle
adaptive and generative aspects of social artistic creativity.
14.3.2.4 Modelling Creativity in Social Systems
Strands of arts-based computational creativity research have focused on generative
aspects of social systems and their relationship to individual adaptive creativity.
Gero, Sosa and Saunders have explored a large space of social models of design
creativity in which individuals collectively define the social conditions in which
they both produce and judge creative artefacts (Saunders
2001
, Saunders and Gero
2001
, Sosa and Gero
2003
). Saunders and Gero (
2001
), for example, demonstrates
clique formation through mutual influence and learning of specialised interest, sug-
gesting a generative creative process in which a population of agents spawn novel
styles through a group dynamic. Such models often establish the necessary condi-
tions for generative creativity by establishing that what determines fitness is not an
external environment but the population itself through a process of feedback (Laland
et al.
1999
, Bown and Wiggins
2005
), a fundamental consideration in evolutionary
psychology (Dunbar
1998
, Tomasello
1999
), and a property of other generatively
creative processes in nature, such as sexual selection (Miller
2000
) and niche con-
struction (Odling-Smee et al.
2003
).
I have adapted such models to an evolutionary context in order to explore the
potential influence of generative social dynamics on evolutionary change (Bown
2008
). Pinker (
1998
) uses “evolutionary cheesecake” as a description of music invit-
ing the question of whether such a cultural development might actually become re-
inforced, and thus biologically locked-in, through evolutionary adaptations: if mu-
sical behaviour becomes adaptively beneficial to individuals through its increasing
prominence in social life—which is the implication of Pinker's hypothesis—then
