The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional

234 Pages·2017·5.29 MB·English

by  Agustín Fuentes

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Engravings: Christopher S. Henshilwood. All other illustrations by Daniel Lagin.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Fuentes, Agustín, author.
Title: The creative spark : how imagination made humans exceptional /
Agustín Fuentes.
Description: New York, New York : Dutton, Penguin Random House, an imprint of
Penguin Random House, LLC, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016030260 (print) | LCCN 2016049511 (ebook) | ISBN
9781101983942 (hc) | ISBN 9781101983966 (trade pbk.) | ISBN 9781101983959 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. | Imagination. | Creative
ability. | Human behavior.
Classification: LCC BD450 .F79456 2017 (print) | LCC BD450 (ebook) | DDC 153.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030260
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact
information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for
changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Version_1
To everyone past, present, and future who dares to imagine, create, and learn
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Overture: Trumpeting Creativity and a New Synthesis
PART ONE
STICKS AND STONES: The First Creativity
1. Creative Primates
2. The Last Hominin Standing
PART TWO
WHAT’S FOR DINNER?: How Humans Got Creative
3. Let’s Make a Knife
4. Killing and Eating, Etc.
5. The Beauty of Standing in Line
6. Food Security Accomplished
PART THREE
WAR AND SEX: How Humans Shaped a World
7. Creating War (and Peace)
8. Creative Sex
PART FOUR
THE GREAT WORKS: How Humans Made the Universe
9. Religious Foundations
10. Artistic Flights
11. Scientific Architecture
Coda: The Beat of Your Creative Life
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
OVERTURE
TRUMPETING CREATIVITY AND A NEW SYNTHESIS
When we consider creativity, we might think of Shakespeare or Mozart, Albert Einstein
or Marie Curie, Charles Dickens or Mary Shelley, Andy Warhol or Annie Leibovitz,
Jamie Oliver or Julia Child, Beyoncé or Prince. We often see the capacity for creativity
residing in a single person or a select group of people. But creativity is not limited to
the United States and Europe or to rich people or to people born in the last 500 years. It is not, after
all, a solitary endeavor limited to the work of a genius or some particularly original thinker.
Creativity is built on interconnections of ideas, experiences, and imagination. Whether in the
physics lab, the artist’s studio, the mechanic’s garage, or even in figuring out how to make a small
paycheck last until the end of the month, creativity is everywhere in the human experience. We are
creative every day. But we do not accomplish this miraculous feat on our own.
Writer Maria Popova tells us that creativity is our “ability to tap into our mental pool of
resources—knowledge, insight, information, inspiration, and all the fragments populating our
minds . . . and to combine them in extraordinary new ways.” Archeologist Ian Hodder agrees,
telling us that creativity is the space between the material reality and our imagination where
intelligence, adaptability, agency, interpretation, and problem solving all come together, but he also
emphasizes that it is a thoroughly social process. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu highlights the
fundamental human ability to project our ideas onto the world and transform them into materially
resounding reality. This book illustrates the clear connection between these views of creativity and
the extraordinary story of human evolution.
Countless individuals’ ability to think creatively is what led us to succeed as a species. At the
same time, the initial condition of any creative act is collaboration.
Every poet has her muse, every engineer an architect, every knight a squire, every politician a
constituency, but it’s rarely just two or three or four people in the collaboration. More often it’s
hundreds or even thousands who collaborate over time and space to produce the most profound
creative moments. Dancer-choreographer Twyla Tharp writes, “sometimes we collaborate to jump-
start creativity; other times the focus [of collaboration] is simply on getting things done. In each
case, people in a good collaboration accomplish more than the group’s most talented members could
achieve on their own.”
By delving into our past and drawing on the best and most current scientific knowledge, we shall
see that creativity is at the very root of how we evolved and why we are the way we are. It’s our
ability to move back and forth between the realms of “what is” and “what could be” that has
enabled us to reach beyond being a successful species to become an exceptional one.
The nature of humans’ creative collaboration is multilayered and varies widely. But our
distinctively human capacity for shared intentionality coupled with our imagination is how we
became who we are today.
This cocktail of creativity and collaboration distinguishes our species—no other species has ever
been able to do it so well—and has propelled the development of our bodies, minds, and cultures,
both for good and for bad. We are neither the nastiest species nor the nicest species. We are neither
entirely untethered from our biological nature nor slavishly yoked to it. It’s not the drive to
reproduce, nor competition for mates, resources, or power, nor our propensity for caring for one
another that has separated us from all other creatures. We are, first and foremost, the species
singularly distinguished and shaped by creativity. This is the new story of human evolution, of our
past and current nature.
The Four Big Misconceptions of Human Evolution
But aren’t we modern humans supposed to be the progeny of demonic males? Weren’t we stamped
with a deep evolutionary history in which natural selection favored more aggressive males, leading
to a biological proclivity toward violence and sexual coercion? In other words, aren’t we the species
that is supremely good at being bad—naturally selfish, aggressive, and competitive?
No! says this professor.
We are the species that is naturally caring, altruistic, and cooperative, distinguished early in our
evolution from other primates by privileging the sharing of our food and other resources, self-
sacrifice, and service to the good of the group over self-interest—are we not? We are, in short, a
species of supercooperators, supremely good at being good.
Nope, that’s not it either.
Well, isn’t our nature shaped primarily by the happenstances of the environments we lived in and
the challenges and opportunities they presented? And aren’t we therefore a species still better
adapted to traditional lives as hunter-gatherers than to modern, mechanized, urbanized, and tech-
connected life? Hasn’t this modern disconnect with our evolutionary roots led to mental health
issues and widespread dissatisfaction with our lives?
And didn’t our intelligence allow us to transcend the boundaries of biological evolution, rising
above the pressures and limits of the natural environment and molding the world to serve our
purposes—increasingly to the planet’s peril? Aren’t we the Promethean breed, who, having made all
the world our dominion, are now running it, and ultimately ourselves, into ruin?
Sorry, but no, again.
These are the four currently predominant arguments about human evolution and human nature.
Compelling as they all are—with voluminous research literature behind them, as well as eloquent
journalists and scientists making strong cases for each—they are also radically incomplete, each
leaning too heavily on certain evidence and preconceptions while either actively casting aside, or
simply overlooking, the wider body of important findings. These include a flood of revelations in
anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, and sociology over the past twenty
years. While each of the four arguments has been instrumental in pushing our understanding of
human nature forward, each has also led to gross simplification and some serious misunderstandings
—such as the ideas that we’re naturally disposed toward conflict and that we’re divided into different
biological races. Perhaps most important, these popular accounts have obscured the wonderful story
at the heart of our evolution—the story of how, from the days of our earliest, protohuman ancestors,
we have survived and increasingly thrived because of our exceptional capacity for creative
collaboration.
It’s the epic tale of all epic tales: the story of a group of highly vulnerable creatures—the favored
prey of a terrifying array of ferocious predators—who learn better than any of their primate relatives to
apply their ingenuity to devising ways of working together to survive; to invest their world with
meaning and their lives with hope; and to reshape their world, thereby reshaping themselves.
A New Synthesis
Whether it was eluding predators, making and sharing stone tools, controlling fire, telling stories,
or contending with shifts in climate, our ancestors creatively collaborated to deal with the challenges
the world threw at them. At first they did so in ways that were just marginally more effective than
those of their prehuman forebears and other humanlike species. Over time, that minor edge of
advantage expanded, refined, and propelled them into a category all their own.
Recent discoveries and theoretical shifts in evolutionary theory and biology, such as the insights
about how our environment and life experiences affect the functioning of our genes and bodies, along
with new findings in the fossil record and ancient DNA, have changed the basic story of humanity. A
new synthesis demonstrates that humans acquired a distinctive set of neurological, physiological,
and social skills that enabled us, starting from the earliest days, to work together and think together
in order to purposefully cooperate. Our genes tell only one aspect of how we became creative at
increasing levels of complexity.
Using these abilities, our ancestors started to help one another care for the young, whether or not
those young were their own. They began to share food for both nutritional and social reasons and to
coordinate activities beyond what was needed for survival. Acting in ways that benefited the group,
not just the individual or family, became increasingly common. This baseline of creative
cooperation, the ability to get along, to help one another and have one another’s backs, and to think
and communicate with one another with increasing prowess, transformed us into the beings that
invented the technologies that supported large-scale societies and ultimately nations. This
collaborative creativity also drove the development of religious beliefs and ethical systems and our
production of masterful artwork. Of course, it also tragically fueled and facilitated our ability to
compete in more deadly ways. We applied essentially the same creativity in killing other members
of our species as we did to manipulating planetary ecology to the brink of complete devastation.
Nevertheless, while humans are obviously capable of intense damage and cruelty, our tendency
toward compassion plays a larger role in our evolutionary history.
The goal of this book is a far more nuanced, complete, and judicious account of our evolution
than has previously been possible. This new story is based on a synthesis of the full range of
relevant research, old and new, across evolutionary biology, genetics, primate behavior,
anthropology, archeology, psychology, neuroscience, ecology, and even philosophy.
The new synthesis that I present in this book is embedded in the cutting-edge contemporary
understanding of evolution that has taken shape only over the last few decades. Evolutionary theory
has changed considerably since Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace first proposed evolution
via natural selection more than 150 years ago. Today our best understanding of evolutionary
processes is called the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES), in which a range of different
processes, beyond just natural selection, are central in explaining how, and why, animals, plants,
and all living things evolve.
Evolution as we know it today can be summarized as follows: Mutation (changes in the DNA)
introduces genetic variation, which in interaction with the growth and development of the body
(from conception until death) produces a range of variations (differences in bodies and behavior) in
organisms. This biological variation can move around within a species by individuals moving in
and out of populations (called gene flow), and sometimes chance events alter the distribution of
variation in a population (called genetic drift). Much of this variation can be passed from generation
to generation through reproduction and other forms of transmission and inheritance. Then there’s
natural selection.
Natural selection does not mean what most people think it means. Rather than being a lethal
competition for survival in which the biggest, baddest, and “fittest” battle it out on the playing field
of life, natural selection is a filtering process that shapes variation in response to constraints and
pressures in the environment. Imagine a giant strainer with openings of a certain size (that vary as
environmental conditions vary), and then imagine that organisms come in different sizes and shapes
(variation). These organisms have to pass through the strainer in order to get to the next generation
(to reproduce and leave offspring). Those that fit through the strainer’s openings successfully
reproduce, and those that do not, don’t. Some of the successful variants fit through better than others
due to their particular size and shape, which results in their leaving more offspring (who inherit that
specific size and shape). This process, the filtering of variation from generation to generation based
on pressures in the environment, is what natural selection is. So in evolution the type and pattern of
variation and the pressures of the environment matter a great deal.
We now recognize that four systems of inheritance can all provide patterns of variation that
influence evolutionary processes.
1. Genetic inheritance is the passing of genes, encoded in DNA, from one generation to the
next.
2. Epigenetic inheritance affects aspects of systems in the body associated with
development that can transfer from one generation to the next without having a specific
root in the DNA. For example, certain stressors on a mother during pregnancy can affect
the development of the fetus, who may in turn pass those altered characteristics on to her
or his offspring.
3. Behavioral inheritance is the passing of behavioral actions and knowledge from one
generation to the next and is common in many animals, such as when mother
chimpanzees help their offspring learn how to crack nuts with rocks or fish for termites
with sticks.
4. Finally, symbolic inheritance is unique to humans and is the passing down of ideas,
symbols, and perceptions that influence the ways in which we live and use our bodies,
which can potentially affect the transmission of biological information from one
generation to the next.