Related papers: Why the Creative Process is Not Darwinian
Simonton is attempting to salvage the Blind Variation Selective Retention theory of creativity (often referred to as the Darwinian theory of creativity) by dissociating it from Darwinism. This is a necessary move for complex reasons…
Selection theory requires multiple, distinct, simultaneously-actualized states. In cognition, each thought or cognitive state changes the 'selection pressure' against which the next is evaluated; they are not simultaneously selected…
Dietrich and Haider (2014) justify their integrative framework for creativity founded on evolutionary theory and prediction research on the grounds that "theories and approaches guiding empirical research on creativity have not been…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Natural selection successfully explains how organisms accumulate adaptive change despite that traits acquired over a lifetime are eliminated at the end of each generation. However, in some domains that exhibit cumulative, adaptive change --…
Although Darwinian models are rampant in the social sciences, social scientists do not face the problem that motivated Darwin's theory of natural selection: the problem of explaining how lineages evolve despite that any traits they acquire…
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection does not predict long-term progress or advancement, nor does it provide a useful way to define or understand these concepts. Nevertheless, the history of life is marked by major trends that…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…
This paper reviews and clarifies five misunderstandings about cultural evolution identified by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson (2008). First, cultural representations are neither discrete nor continuous; they are distributed across neurons…
Picasso's Guernica sketches continue to provide a fruitful testing ground for examining and assessing the Blind Variation Selective Retention (BVSR) theory of creativity. Nonmonotonicity--e.g. as indicated by a lack of similarity of…
The theory of interaction-based evolution argues that, at the most basic level of analysis, there is a third alternative for how adaptive evolution works besides a) accidental mutation and natural selection and b) Lamarckism, namely, c)…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
Dawkins' replicator-based conception of evolution has led to widespread mis-application selectionism across the social sciences because it does not address the paradox that inspired the theory of natural selection in the first place: how do…
Many of the mathematical frameworks describing natural selection are equivalent to Bayes Theorem, also known as Bayesian updating. By definition, a process of Bayesian Inference is one which involves a Bayesian update, so we may conclude…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
The theory of natural selection cannot describe how early life evolved, in part because acquired characteristics are passed on through horizontal exchange. It has been proposed that culture, like life, began with the emergence of…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…