The creative process of cultural evolution

This chapter explores how we can better understand culture by understanding the creative processes that fuel it, and better understand creativity by examining it from its cultural context. First, it summarizes attempts to develop a scientific framework for how culture evolves, and it explores what these frameworks imply for the role of creativity in cultural evolution. Next it examines how questions about the relationship between creativity and cultural evolution have been addressed using an agent-based model in which neural network-based agents collectively generate increasingly fit ideas by building on previous ideas and imitating neighbors’ ideas. Finally, it outlines studies of how creative outputs are influenced, in perhaps unexpected ways, by other ideas and individuals, and how individual creative styles “peek through" cultural outputs in different domains.