Creation Without a Creator
"Nothing is original… Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent." - Jim Jarmusch
Let me contradict myself. In last week’s post, I argued creativity doesn’t originate from the human mind, but from a creative transmission sent by the divine / universe / god / nature.
Today we’ll explore how creation isn’t in fact a top-down process - and no one is in charge. Oftentimes an idea is worked on by many people. You could argue that creativity comes from a sense of competition and a collective exploration of what is feasible in practice.
The arc of biological evolution constantly leads to the creation of new features, new adaptations, new species, dynamically defined inside a vast, connected ecological system. The process of evolution is unfolding one step at a time. It emerges over time, it doesn’t land. And so is creativity.
To a large extent, evolutionary forces shape what is needed to survive and to find ecosystem equilibrium. Those forces drive creativity in the biological sense.
Evolution has no grand vision, no spark, no eurekas. Instead it provides rewards, punishments, constraints and feedback loops that guide each iteration towards new biological features, new adaptations, etc.
My point is: you don’t need inspiration to be creative. You just need to read and adapt to your own environment, be open to explore and try new ways.
Creativity mirrors Evolution
Non-crab crustaceans have independently evolved a crab body plan multiple times — Borradaile called it "the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab" (1916). At least five separate decapod groups did it. Camera eyes evolved independently in vertebrates and in cephalopods.
What drives human creativity are the same forces that drive genetic mutations: generate widely, edit ruthlessly, keep what survives, repeat. Creativity is a process, a series of bets, not a bold vision. While a vision helps orient collective action, it doesn’t make you more creative.
Schumpeter called entrepreneurship the carrying out of “new combinations.” Economists since have formalized it — knowledge compounds combinatorially, so the stock of possible new ideas explodes faster than anyone’s capacity to build them. The implication is blunt. The raw material of your great idea is the existing pile of ideas, and that pile is sitting in plain view of everyone standing where you stand.
Which is why the same idea keeps arriving to several people at once. Newton and Leibniz both reached calculus. Bell and Gray filed for the telephone on the same day. A famous catalog from the 1920s documented a hundred and forty-eight inventions and discoveries made independently and nearly simultaneously by two or more people. Robert Merton, the sociologist who studied this hardest, concluded that all discoveries are in principle multiples — that the lone breakthrough is just a multiple whose second discoverer got there too late to be remembered.