The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (62 page)

The attention-attracting power of novelty is one of the most fundamental psychological biases that could have influenced the

evolution of courtship displays. In
The Descent of Man,
Darwin

observed that "It would even appear that mere novelty, or change for the sake of change, has sometimes acted like a charm on

female birds, in the same manner as changes of fashion with us." In Darwin's view, novelty-seeking was an irrepressible force in sexual selection that could account for the rapid evolution of sexual ornaments. In recent years more direct evidence has emerged for neophilia in mate choice. Females of several bird species have been found to prefer males who display larger song repertoires, with greater diversity and novelty. Such neophilic

mate choice may account for the creativity of male blackbirds, nightingales, sedge warblers, mockingbirds, parrots, and mynahs.

Primates are especially neophilic, as illustrated by the fictional chimpanzee "Curious George." They are playful, exploratory, and inventive. Apes in zoos are easily bored, and must be given especially rich environments and plenty of other apes to socialize with. It is not yet clear whether this neophilia affects their sexual choice, but primatologist Meredith Small has claimed that "The only consistent interest seen among the general primate population is an interest in novelty and variety." Chimpanzee females sometimes take considerable risks to mate with novel mates from outside their own groups.

In modern human societies, neophilia is the foundation of the art, music, television, film, publishing, drug, travel, pornography, fashion, and research industries, which account for a significant proportion of the global economy. Before such entertainment industries amused us, we had to amuse one another on the African savanna. Our neophilia may have demanded ever more creative displays from our mates. If other apes are neophilic and modern humans are extremely neophilic, perhaps our ancestors were too.

In this view, human creativity evolved through sexual selection as an anti-boredom device. Perhaps as our ancestors evolved larger and cleverer brains, their neophilia increased as well. Boredom became more frustrating. Sexual partners who were regarded as tedious after a few days or weeks could not have established the longer-term relationships that yielded large reproductive payoffs. Less creative brains that offered less ongoing novelty to sexual partners did not leave as many offspring. This would have been sufficient for creativity to evolve.

Potentially, the cognitive variety offered by one creative individual can compensate for the physical variety offered by a string of short-term sexual partners. Scheherazade retained her sultan's interest by producing a stream of novel stories, to compensate him for giving up the stream of novel women he had previously enjoyed. This does not imply that creativity evolved as a "pair-bonding mechanism." Rather, individuals who wish to retain a sexual partner's interest over the long term found it

strategically effective to act more creative, playful, and innovative in their relationship. Basically, this kept boredom from driving their lovers into the arms of another.

Sexual choice did not favor unpredictability at all levels of behavior. Predictable kindness and predictable sexual fidelity were probably valued. For couples to successfully cooperate, they must be able to anticipate each other's needs and plans. At the other extreme, superficial or dangerous forms of unpredictability were unlikely to have proven attractive. Epileptic fits may be protean in form, but are not considered creative. The mad dog strategy may be effective in terrifying subordinates (and lovers who wish to leave), but it is not sexually attractive.

The attractive forms of novelty tend to rely on a uniquely human trick: the creative recombination of learned symbolic elements (e.g. words, notes, movements, visual symbols) to produce novel arrangements with new emergent meanings (e.g. stories, melodies, dances, paintings). This trick allows human courtship displays not just to tickle another's senses, but to create new ideas and emotions right inside their minds, where they will most influence mate choice. Scheherazade did not produce a random series of nonsense words to play upon the sultan's neophilia. She took existing words that already had a meaning, and put them together in new combinations that evoked new characters, plots, and images. To produce novelty at the cognitive level, one must use standardized signals at the perceptual level.

Creativity is not just a production line for churning out random ideas. It depends on both selective retention and blind variation. A capacity for novelty production will yield interesting entertainment only if it is combined with a huge knowledge base, virtuoso expression, and good critical judgment. It also demands the social intelligence necessary to figure out how to express a novel idea in a comprehensible way. As all writers know, it is one thing to have an idea in one's head, and quite another to put it on paper in a way that will evoke it in someone else's head. In his classic 1950 book
The Creative Process,
Brewster Ghiselin noted that "Even the most energetic and original mind, in order to reorganize or extend

human insight in any valuable way, must have attained more than ordinary mastery of the field in which it is to act, a strong sense of what needs to be done, and skill in the appropriate means of expression." A creative display demands skill and motivation, not just inspiration.

Creative Problem-Solving Versus Creative Display

Creativity research has focused much more on creative problem-solving than on creative courtship display. It is easy to envision natural selection favoring animals who solve their survival problems more creatively. Psychologists tend to think of Wolfgang Köhler's experiments from the 1920s, in which chimpanzees figured out how to stand on a box and use a stick to knock some bananas down from a height so they could eat them. Such examples lead us to think of creativity being favored for its survival payoffs, and this focus is reinforced by research funding priorities. Creativity research justifies its costs as a way to discover how people might improve their ability to solve technical problems. Corporations want more creative thinkers so they can patent more innovations, not so their workers can attract better mates. The problem-solving viewpoint has been reinforced by the mass of biographical research on the creativity of great scientists and inventors.

Many creativity researchers suggest that an idea's creativity should be measured by two criteria: novelty and utility. Utility concerns the idea's appropriateness for solving a well-defined problem. Novelty is somewhat incidental, reflecting the difficulty of solving that problem and thus how rarely people have solved it in the past. In this problem-solving perspective, human creativity is subject to the same bottom line as R & D divisions in a corporation. The blue-sky dreaming has to yield dividends sooner or later: novelty cannot be justified as an end in itself, only as a means of finding otherwise elusive solutions. Cognitive psychology is especially concerned with problem-solving. Since Herbert Simon's work on artificial intelligence and problem-solving in the 1950s, cognitive psychology has gradually taken over creativity

research. Creativity is sometimes seen as little more than a way to solve slightly harder-than-average problems.

It is possible, but rather dreary to see the world as a mixture of problems and solutions. One could even speak of courtship as a problem and displays as a solution. But this problem-oriented viewpoint rather misses the point of human creativity and indeed of courtship display in general.

Consider the creativity demanded by slapstick comedy. The great physical comedians of the silent-film era, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, were not in the business of solving problems. On the contrary. Their genius lay in taking unproblematic everyday acts, and turning them into elaborately inventive displays of clumsiness. The climbing of a ladder became an opportunity for exploring the dozens of inappropriate ways in which a human body can interact with a ladder and a floor. Comedy depends on showing how many ways something can go wrong—on violating expectations, not solving problems.

Perhaps in considering the evolution of creativity, we should focus more on humor and less on technical invention. I think that neophilic laughter rather than technophilic profit was the fitness payoff that mattered in the evolution of creativity. Laughter may seem a rather weak thread from which to hang such a grand ornament as human creativity, yet laughter is an important part of human nature. It is universal within our species, manifest in distinct facial and vocal expressions. It emerges spontaneously during childhood, and is deeply pleasurable. It shows all the hallmarks of a psychological adaptation.

An appreciation of humor is an important part of mate choice too. One of the strongest and most puzzling findings from evolutionary psychology research has been the value that people around the world place on a good sense of humor. Indeed, this is one of the few human traits important enough to have its own abbreviation (GSOH) in personal ads. Perhaps we can finally understand why a GSOH is so frequently requested and so frequently advertised by singles seeking mates. A capacity for comedy reveals a capacity for creativity It plays upon our intense

neophilia. It circumvents our tendencies towards boredom. Creativity is a reliable indicator of intelligence, energy, youth, and proteanism. Humor is attractive, and that is why it evolved.

In his 1964 book
The Act of Creation
, Arthur Koestler struggled in vain to find a survival function for creative wit, humor, and laughter. He wrote:

What is the survival value of the involuntary, simultaneous contraction of fifteen facial muscles associated with certain noises which are often irrepressible? Laughter is a reflex, but unique in that it serves no apparent biological purpose; one might call it a luxury reflex. Its only utilitarian function, as far as one can see, is to provide temporary relief from utilitarian pressures. On the evolutionary level where laughter arises, an element of frivolity seems to creep into a humorless universe governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival of the fittest.

Looking for survival value in a sexually attractive biological "luxury" is arguably the most typical mistake of 20th-century theorizing about human evolution. This book has repeatedly celebrated this "element of frivolity" that sexual selection introduces into the cosmos. Humor—the wit to woo—is one of its most delightful products.

Where Partnerships Can Be
joined or Loosened in an Instant

Our creative capacities remain hard to fathom at the psychological level, despite the emergence of some reasonable evolutionary theories about their origins. When caught in creativity's flow, the mind seems to let itself go more liquid than solid. The best description of this state was written by William James in an 1880 article for
The Atlantic Monthly:

Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another in a beaten track of habitual suggestion, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to

another, the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbling about in a state of bewildered activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law.

One of William James's best friends was the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who saw himself as a spokesman for the indeterminate, the chaotic, and the random. Peirce had little patience for those who viewed the human mind as a deterministic system running on the fixed rails of heredity and environment. The human mind, in his view, was an arena of refined chaos, where description is difficult and prediction is impossible. Yet Peirce, like James, was sympathetic to Darwinism, and viewed the mind as a natural evolutionary outcome.

Perhaps science will one day regain the sophistication about human creativity that it attained in 1880s Harvard, when James and Peirce saw no conflict between a Darwinian theory of mental evolution and an indeterminist theory of mental processes. They would have viewed our current debates about "genetic determinism" with amusement. They understood that inherited mental capacities could produce unpredictable behaviors, not just by accident, but by design. This chapter has been a sort of footnote to Peirce's joyful indeterminism. We have seen that many games demand mixed strategies, and many evolutionary situations demand unpredictable behavior. Human creativity may be the culmination of a long trend toward ever more sophisticated brain mechanisms that produce ever less predictable behaviors. These capacities may make psychology maddeningly difficult as a predictive science, but they also make life worth living outside the lab.

from the observation that romantic comedy is a rather more successful film genre than documentaries on the lives of great inventors. This is not just because romantic comedy depicts attractive people progressing through a successful courtship by exploiting each other's neophilia. It is also because romantic comedies form part of our own courtship efforts. We can (indirectly) pay Hollywood scriptwriters to make our intended romantic partners laugh. But our ancestors could not do this, and even now it does not suffice. If we prove boring during the conversation after the film, our dates may say they had a lovely time, but let's be just friends. You can't buy love. You have to inspire it, partly through humor, the premier arena for advertising your creativity.