Why Is Man Creative?
 

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So I was talking with me Bio prof. about kissing last February, and she talked about the evolutionary benefits of certain behaviors. For instance, we groom ourselves to keep away small pests and the diseases they could carry. We fight for resources.

A lot of things can be credited to evolution - why we do this, why we do that... But why are we creative? Why do we write poetry, sing songs or paint paintings? What evolutionary benefit does this serve? Why do we do it?

Tools. At some point evolution stumbled onto the fact that a mind that can create things is infinitely more versatile than even the best most adaptable body. A mind that can make tools can overcome just about anything given the time to invent and generally much more quickly than physical evolution. The ability to think more and more abstractly and thus devise more and more complex tools is a giant evolutionary advantage. Everything that we do that is creative is in some way at its base a tool. Language and art are meant to convey meaning and keep records for example. They are social tools. Oh and we aren't the only creative ones just the best at it.

Really, any given episode of According To Jim potentially shatters the idea that mankind is inherently creative.

But all kidding aside (OR WAS I?), such endeavors arguably aren't exclusive to our species, though it may still be mainly a primate thing.

EDIT: Because of tools, yep. There we go. Thank you, Sith.

One might argue that our need to be creative and express ourselves evolved as a way to reduce stress and solve more complex problems we might face. One might also suggest it is a biproduct of our species evolving more advanced brains.

Humans aren't the only species to exhibit creativity, although this can be contested based upon your definition of "creativity." True, we may be the only species to create art and music (I'm not counting zoo animals that people teach how to "paint"), but more intelligent animals have demonstrated very clever ways of solving problems that aren't directly related to evolution. Take the example of the crows in Japan who learned to drop nuts into crosswalks to let passing cars crack the shells. The nuts aren't their only food source-- finding ways to crack them open wasn't something they needed to do to survive. Extra freaky: Look at the example of the aquarium dolphins who taught themselves to blow bubble rings. They serve no real purpose: the dolphins blow the bubbles and then push them around with their noses for no reason other than entertaining themselves.

Let's not kid ourselves here. You could put up a painting by Koko the Gorilla in the middle of a Jackson Pollock exhibit and no one would be the wiser.

There was a quote by someone - I'm not sure who - about perspective; they said that "If I showed you a rather rudimentary picture, you might say that it was total garbage. However, if I told you that the picture was done by a chimpanzee, you'd say 'Oh - well in that case, it's rather good for a chimpanzee.'"

As someone who's dabbled in abstract expressionism myself, I wouldn't exactly call the style "garbage," really.

And both Pollock and Koko were definitely better at it than I was.

So that man's work can be hotlinked on web forums in illegibly tiny resolution.

This is interesting... but how would you define "creative" in the first place? Because what you're describing here is the result of us evolving larger, more intelligent brains. And while it makes sense that the ability to recognize patterns would develop in parallel to the ability to replicate those patterns, the fact that the most intelligent members of human society aren't always hugely creative, and vice versa, doesn't really support that.

The actual problem is that we developed these huge brains before we started exploiting tool use heavily and before they were seemingly useful.