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we could ask whether humans have even evolved to become more musical under
constructed social pressures. The resulting model illustrated that this reinforcement
could happen through kin selection exploiting social interaction “games” in which
individuals rewarded each other with prestige. According to this model, it isn't even
necessary to assume that music appeared at first as a culturally innovated
suscepti-
bility to enchantment
(Bown
2008
), since the susceptibility itself could be seen to
emerge as a result of the social dynamics.
Such models can in some cases provide a proof-of-concept for mechanisms of
evolution and social change. However, they necessarily remain abstract and far re-
moved from attempts to conduct predictive modelling of social dynamics (Gilbert
1993
).
14.3.3 Individual Humans Can Exhibit Generative and Adaptive
Creativity
It is reasonable to accept the assumption that individual human creativity is strictly
of the adaptive type. Darwinian evolutionary theory predicts that as evolved organ-
isms, most of our behaviour is ruthlessly adaptive, at least adapted with respect
to some evolutionary environment of the past (Wilson
1975
, Dawkins
1976
). But
there are reasons why a human's behaviour could also fit the description of gen-
erative creativity instead. For an individual to be generatively creative, this would
mean that they generate and sustain novel patterns or behaviours without any regard
to the externally determined value of these patterns or behaviours. If art was only
about innovation of artefacts designed to stimulate other people for individual gain,
this would be an unlikely pattern of behaviour. But consider art as a multi-faceted
cultural complex, involving elements such as identity. In service of an identity, an
individual might generatively create effectively arbitrary patterns or behaviour, the
value of which then come through association with other properties of the individ-
ual.
Coe (
2003
) proposes visual decoration as a mechanism for identifying the co-
descendants of a common ancestor in the traditional small-scale societies of our
evolutionary history. Similarly decorated individuals are both common genetic de-
scendants and, more importantly, cultural descendants of an ancestral figure, inher-
iting and thus preserving styles and art techniques originated by that ancestor. Here,
to call the ancestor adaptively creative for successfully innovating a style or tech-
nique is misleading, since the value of the style or technique created might only be
realised through its role for the group. The style or technique might otherwise be
arbitrary. Although the social system maintains the style over the long-term, the in-
dividual may well generatively develop styles and techniques according to idiosyn-
cratic methods, and sustain them for some time. Admittedly we may never know the
true generative status of individuals, since their creative output is always manifest in
social interactive contexts, but introspectively we can all appreciate the generative
capacity of the mind at work, producing thoughts in the background without regard
