The Creativity of Natural Selection and the Creativity of Organisms: Their Roles in Traditional Evolutionary Theory and Some Proposed Extensions

Biological adaptations appear designed for a purpose, and so they result from a “creative process” almost by definition. Traditional evolutionary theory assigns a special role in this process to natural selection, with theorists invoking selection both to explain the appearance of purpose, and to predict what the purpose of adaptations will be. At the same time, traditional theory recognizes that many other factors might influence the evolution of adaptations. These factors might, for example, increase evolvability and accelerate adaptation, or bias evolution towards a subset of the possible adaptive outcomes. Such factors are also creative in a sense, but not in the same sense as natural selection. Challenges to traditional theory have sometimes championed organisms as a neglected source of creativity in evolution. This could be interpreted as the radical claim that non-human organisms—like people—are novel sources of purpose in nature, generating apparently designed outcomes that are not directed at reproductive success. But it might also be interpreted as the uncontroversial claim that organisms—like many other things—sometimes act in a way that accelerates adaptation or makes some adaptive outcomes more probable than others. Ambiguity about their claims has led to theories attracting unwarranted enthusiasm and unwarranted scepticism, and distracts us from the criteria by which the theories should be judged.