The evolutionary psychology of human creativity

Nature is full of creativity and from an evolutionary perspective, creativity is not as hard to explain as Darwin thought it would be (e.g. the peacock's tail). Sexual selection plays an important role in creativity as seen in bowerbirds, whose females tend to pick the males with the most creative nests for mating. Human creativity is somewhat more complex, though. We still don’t know what drove the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution (aka Big Bang or Great Leap Forward) that brought about the famous cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira. Even more mysterious is the creative explosion that followed after the advent of agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution or the Scientific Revolution of our modern age.

In The 10,000 Year Explosion (2009) Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argue that the latter was perhaps the most important creative period in history:


Science as we know it got its official start in Europe in the sixteenth century with the publication of Copernicus’s work De revolutionibus in 1543. The closest thing to modern science seen before that would have been the protoscience practiced by the Greek and, later, Arab civilizations—but they’re not that close. The productivity and intensity of modern science far outshines earlier efforts. Some of the most important European scientists, such as Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Charles Darwin, made larger intellectual contributions as individuals than other entire civilizations did over a period of centuries.

We believe that science requires communication and cooperation between people who are unusually good at (and interested in) puzzle-solving. Science is a social enterprise, and scientists never truly work alone: They always build on the work of others. It was Newton who said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” and he ought to have known. So the number of such people, and their social connections, is crucial to the progress of science. We also know that modest differences in mean ability can have a big effect on how common such people are. You see, there can also be phase transitions in connectivity. Imagine that the average budding scientist in Europe in 1450 knew a few other people like himself. Those acquaintances knew others, but since such people were rare, the potential scientists of Europe fell into small, isolated groups rather than a single connected community. There was no efficient way for new ideas and discoveries to spread. We are positing that as the frequency of such people increased, there was a sharp transition at a certain critical value. Suddenly all groups connected, and there was a path between any two members. Something similar happens in epidemiology: If the number and density of vulnerable individuals exceeds a certain threshold, the infectious disease is certain to spread to the entire community. Below that threshold, the disease is confined to a small cluster of people and dies out.

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending make the point that creativity is at least partially explicable with more open and networked societies. They do believe that creative individuals may have evolved so beneficial traits in such, more complex, societies, but that there were no selective pressures for increased creativity itself. One huge problem is that it is hard to see which evolutionary benefits increased creativity would have brought about in farming communities. What’s more, there is this mysterious link between mental health problems and increased creativity:

Our view is in sharp contrast to those who have argued that creativity conferred fitness benefits. It has been shown that poets are unusually likely to be manic-depressive [i.e. bipolar disorder]. Building on this, others have argued that alleles underlying manic-depression should have increased in frequency because of the social rewards received by poets and other creative artists. Of course, few people carrying those alleles had a chance to be poets: Most (in recent millennia) must have been hardscrabble farmers, and it’s hard to see how manic-depression could have been an advantage in that situation.

Bipolar disorder and the mostly non-practical value (in an agricultural society) of creativity seem to have been very limiting in spreading “creative genes” and there are more problems:

In fact, poets have seldom received large rewards, and their fitness has often been low—particularly among those with manic-depression, as a result of its high suicide risk. More generally, creativity seldom confers large fitness advantages, because good new ideas can be rapidly copied by others. The copiers receive the fitness benefits without paying the associated costs. In fact, it’s been obvious for a long time that innovators seldom harvest much of the benefit generated by their innovations. Public policy has aimed at increasing those rewards—for example, through patent systems and public support of scientific research. Such support is limited and fairly recent, however, and over the long run of human history and prehistory, direct selection for creativity seems unlikely.

There are abundant examples of poets who died in poverty and, what’s more important in evolutionary psychology, childless (e.g. Jane Austin, Lewis Caroll, H. C. Anderson, E. A. Poe, Dr. Suess, G. B Shaw, T. S. Elliot and there are really many more). If you think that more practically minded engineers and scientists were better off, I may remind you of Copernicus, Tesla, Newton, Oliver Sacks, Edwin Hubble and Dian Fossey. It’s almost like there is a curse on creatives and innovators that makes them have fewer or no offspring at all and there is a negative rather than positive correlation with spreading “creative genes”. While Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending think that societal conditions are essential to creativity, they also think there is a genetic component, but it’s somehow mysterious:

Technical and social factors must have been important in increasing social connectivity: Better transportation, regular mail services, and the printing press, for example, played essential roles. Although inventions such as the printing press were undoubtedly important, they seem to have been necessary rather than sufficient, since science either does not exist or is appallingly feeble in the majority of the world’s populations, even among those that have access to those favorable technological factors. If a region or population produces major advances in knowledge, science there is real and alive, otherwise not. [...]  As Pervez Hoodbhoy (head of the physics department in Islamabad) has written, “No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now.”

Why hasn’t the once great Muslim world, that brought great poetry (e.g. Rumi) and science (e.g. algebra) produced any real innovations since then? With the Muslim world the answer may be simply that Muslim societies aren’t open enough, in fact, they have become increasing closed over the past decades and increasingly hostile towards science and democracy at the same time creating an atmosphere that is infertile for creativity and innovation.


However, the same point Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending are making for the Muslim world can be made for the Western world. What about Greece? Once a hotbed of innovation, Greece hasn’t impressed a lot for the past 2.000 years or so and ranks a meagre 47th on a list of 132 of the world's most innovative countries. Greece is fairly open and democratic, so could genes play a role after all? Below is a map of genetic admixture for Anatolian farmers. We can see that innovation followed farming wherever it went: Anatolia, Greece, Sicily, Southern Spain. There is nothing surprising about that.


However, these very countries are the ones that rank lowest in innovation nowadays. It is the northern countries that have more hunter-gatherer admixture (AND are open, which excludes Russia) that have the highest rates of innovation.

Could it be that innovation has always been fueled by hunter-gatherer admixture in agricultural societies? A fuel that slowly burned out due to slower rates of reproduction (foragers reproduce about every four years vs every two years for farmers). If so, why should this have been the case? If so, that would mean that foragers are actually more creative than farmers, this just doesn’t seem to be the case. Well, not so fast. Foragers are incredibly creative and imaginative when it comes to reading nature (e.g. inferring the species, age, direction, etc. of an animal they are tracking from a few patterns). What’s more, foragers in the past probably never felt much need to innovate as high mobility prevented a flourishing material culture. So, what would have made foragers incorporated into farming societies more innovative?

Agriculture in Malthusian conditions must have also favored individuals who were metabolically efficient and could produce the maximum work for a given amount of food. Among hunter-gatherers the selective pressures were different—in their way of life, bursts of strength in war or hunting were relatively more important. We see differences in the gene alpha-actinin-3 (ACTN3) that may reflect this. The gene has two forms—one that produces a protein that is active in fast-twitch muscles, and one that produces no protein at all. The intact version of the gene increases muscle power and is noticeably more common among world-class sprinters than in the rest of the population; the other version of the gene increases aerobic efficiency and endurance. Gene-engineered mice with the endurance version of ACTN3 can run 33 percent farther than standard lab mice before exhaustion sets in.24 Both forms of ACTN3 are found in all populations, but the endurance form appears to have become more common since the advent of agriculture in Europe. We suspect that it made peasant farmers more productive. At first, all these pro-agricultural behaviors must have run against the grain: It’s unlikely that humans were comfortable doing things that had never made sense in the past. But over time, alleles that induced this kind of ant-like behavior must have increased in frequency, until eventually, after millennia, selfish, hardworking, self-denying people were far more common than they had been among hunter-gatherers. Acting like ants rather than grasshoppers didn’t improve the average standard of living over the long haul, since the world was Malthusian, but farmers who worked harder than average and saved more than their neighbors would have had higher-than-average fitness. Eventually there must have been many people with personality types that hadn’t existed at all among our forager ancestors.

If ancient farmers were more productive than foragers (and they certainly were as hunter-gatherers nowadays show considerable struggles when they have to take up farming or herding), foragers types would have had a considerable disadvantage. They would have been less apt at farming (routine work) and fatigued more easily, similarly to the picture we have of artists and scientists. What if these kinds of creatives have personality types that contrast with the farmer personality type Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending hypothesise? Farming requires relatively little creativity but much higher productivity than other types of subsistence strategies:

In this scheme, nomadic subsistence strategies would require more creativity than sedentary ones, which would require more long-term planning but otherwise relatively little creativity. In fact, there seem to be various genetic differences between nomadic and sedentary people:

We know of a gene that may play a part in this story: the 7R (for 7-repeat) allele of the DRD4 (dopamine receptor D4) gene. It is associated with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a behavioral syndrome best characterized by actions that annoy elementary school teachers: restless-impulsive behavior, inattention, distractibility, and the like.

The polymorphism is found at varying but significant levels in many parts of the world, but is almost totally absent from East Asia. Interestingly, alleles derived from the 7R allele are fairly common in China, even though the 7R alleles themselves are extremely rare there. It is possible that individuals bearing these alleles were selected against because of cultural patterns in China. The Japanese say that the nail that sticks out is hammered down, but in China it may have been pulled out and thrown away.

ADHD is associated with a higher level of creativity. Conformism and obedience to authority that are associated with those farming cultures are negatively correlated with creativity. In fact, it seems that agricultural societies select against creative personalities! East Asian cultures are renowned for their high productivity and work ethos, much less so for their creativity. China, like most agricultural societies, was once a hotbed of innovation. Considering its huge population, China's contribution to innovation seems mediocre at best. China is much better at copying Western innovations than coming up with its own.

Nomadic foragers and herders would be much less conforming in an agricultural society. Especially as both are egalitarian and wouldn’t easily comply with authority. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. I think this is exactly what we are seeing in the phenomenon of the Japanese hikikomori. Hikikomori is a Japanese word describing a condition that mainly affects adolescents or young adults who live isolated from the world, cloistered within their parents' homes, locked in their bedrooms for days, months, or even years on end, and refusing to go to school or work (authority, hierarchical organisation). The Japanese consider these hikikomori lazy. Researchers consider them to have mental health problems or forms of neurodiversity (autism, ADHD). It seems likely that the Japanese are selecting (biologically, reproductively) AGAINST their most creative potential. If someone is a creative type they would be MORE likely to rebel against authority and be non-conformist.  In fact, this is what we tend to find in real life: poets and scientists are the first to rise against authority (most recent example: Putin’s war against Ukraine), point out injustices and criticise society and social developments.

We have come full circle in this discussion, back to where we started from: creative and innovative people are less likely to reproduce. Not only do poets tend to have fewer offspring, but also other kinds of creatives, including academics. Including the very evolutionary psychologists who tell us that the whole purpose of life is reproduction: Steve Pinker and Geoffrey Miller are only of the most widely known ones. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most famous evolutionary theorist, has only one daughter and therefore only replicated half of his genome.

If my hypothesis is true, it would not only explain why creatives have a higher risk of bipolar disorder (maladapted to a farmer world) but it also means we are slowly running out of creatives and innovators. Many rational optimists, like Steve Pinker and Matt Ridley, take innovation for granted in their optimistic view of humankind’s future. What if it’s not? In that case, perhaps it might be time to think of plan B.

For more on the hunter-gatherer hypothesis check out my books:

The hunter-gatherer neurotribe: gifted, geeks, aspies and other aliens in this world

Dreamers, Visionaries and Revolutionaries : The Secret of the Idea People

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