Evolution, creativity, intelligence, and madness: “Here Be Dragons”

One of the great joys of being a scien-tist is the hunt for an elusive signal withinthe noise of data, opinions, biases, andother human foibles associated with thepursuit of knowledge. It is inevitable thatthis imperfect quest will result in manyfalse starts along the way when looking“through a glass, darkly. ” Our imperfectand incomplete knowledge of the worldmust look like an unpolished mirror,reﬂecting gibberish, at times. However, italsoreﬂectsanunderlyingsignalthatbearsfurther scrutiny, in spite of our instinctto discard a ﬂawed image of reality. Thepursuit of the neural underpinnings ofcreative cognition is certainly that “darkglass” we peer into so intently, attempt-ing to grasp, through our meager instru-ments, some hidden truth. Many thinkersand researchers have found that creativityand madness seem somehow to be inter-twined, but the signal is weak, the imageblurry, and the propensity toward roman-tic stereotypes is high. And yet, as scien-tists, we can only follow the data, tryingtomakesenseofwhatittellsus.So,ratherthan entertain the premise outright let metake you on a bit of a journey (which willend back at madness, I promise). First: What if evolutionary processesselected for two types of reasoning? CosmidesandToobyhypothesizeda“ded-icated intelligence” that “refers to theability of a computational system tosolve predeﬁned, target set of prob-lems. ” These problems often involve wellestablished rules—like your mundanelife, and Raven’s Matrices problems, andacquiring a language (Pinker, 1991). Theother problems require “improvisationalintelligence” referring to “the ability of acomputational system to improvise solu-tions to novel problems” (Cosmides andTooby, 2002). These problems are moretransient and involve contingencies thatmay or may not persist over time—likeﬁguring out how to get into your car, hav-ing locked your keys inside. Philosopherscall the former type of problem solving“deductive reasoning”—the observationsnecessarily result in a conclusion beingmade based on the evidence. They are rulebased, deterministic, and the cause leadsnaturallytoeffect.Thelatterproblemsolv-ing is called “abductive reasoning”—thereare an inﬁnite number of possible solu-tionstothemyriadchallengesfacedinthe world; therefore a theory best explainsthe observation, given the evidence. Thisreasoningisprobabilistic,involvesapprox-imation,and(importantly)guessing.Bothmethods are adaptive: one for problemsthat are familiar, the other for problemsthat have never been encountered before.Kanazawa (2004) views intelligence(incorrectly), the pinnacle of deductivereasoning, as THE domain-speciﬁc adap-tation to solving novel problems in theenvironment.However,itismycontentionthat intelligence and creativity occupy twoextremes of a dichotomy: intelligence sup-plies a “dedicated reasoning capacity” forproblems that possess rule-based, cause-effect relationships. Others have coveredwell, and provide empirical support for,the “general purpose problem solving”capacity of intelligence and “g” (Kaufmanet al., 2011): I am merely saying here thatthe mechanism is rather “dedicated” tocause-effectrelationships—acapacitywithbroad applicability to deductive reason-ing tasks. In contrast, creativity emergedas an adaptive cognitive mechanism forlow frequency, “improvisational reason-ing,” where solutions to problems areunsighted (Simonton, 2013), and proba-bilistic approximation could lead to novelsolutions. Creative reasoning solves theminority of problems that are unforeseenand yet of high adaptability: “The light-ning has struck the tree near the campand set it on ﬁre. The ﬁre is now spread-ing to the dry underbrush. What should Ido? ” (Kanazawa, 2004). In this conceptu-alization, creativity is an evolved cognitivemechanism to abstract, to synthesize, tosolve non-recurrent problems in the envi-ronment. Finally, intelligence should beseen as a rather stable evolved mechanismover the last 1.6 million years (i.e., thesingular“innovation”beingtheAcheuleanhand ax), while creativity appears to haveappeared, in humans at least, in thelast ∼30,000 years (Gabora and Kaufman,2010). Intelligence may not be evolution-arily novel, but creativity certainly is.Perhaps the most parsimonious the-ory of creative cognition to incorporateevolutionary principles is that of BlindVariation and Selective Retention (BVSR)(Campbell, 1960). Indeed, his the-ory posits that creativity in humans“represent(s) cumulated inductiveachievements, stage by stage expansionsof knowledge beyond what could havebeen