The Mind’s New Tricks

Abstract

In the spring of 2008, I was invited to participate in a National Science Foundation workshop on creative designing in Aix-en-Provence. Right at the beginning of the meeting, I experienced a vivid and arresting example of the deep-seated angst about keeping evolutionary thinking, in any form, out of creativity and away from the mind. It was also my crisis point that finally convinced me that I can no longer put off engaging with this issue. The workshop was to identify future directions in creativity research and design science, bringing together people from all relevant disciplines. Engineers mingled with cognitive psychologists, neuroscientist, designers, and people from artificial intelligence. But scientists from one discipline were, conspicuously, missing. When I put the question to John Gero, the workshop’s organizer, why there were no evolutionary biologists present at the meeting, he told me, without a whiff of reservation, that they have nothing to do with the field of creativity and design thinking. I responded by asking the following: If you want to know how pots with handles are made, wouldn’t you want to talk to people who can tell you how pots are made? Tragically, this was not an academic armchair discussion in which a lumper realizes he is talking to a splitter, or perhaps a closet dualist. The workshop was to make recommendations about future funding priorities for one of the biggest funding agencies in the world: it was to report on where things are heading with creativity research and what would be needed to get there. Yet the entire underlying bedrock of the only mechanistic explanation of creativity we know of — the theory of evolution — was thrown out before things got started.