Inventions Other Mother

Playfulness and curiosity in Natural Selection

“Necessity is the mother of invention”

While we don’t know who first said it, many people have. Surely you have heard this phrase, if not used it. 

This quote means that urgency induces creativity. When humans need something, we search harder for solutions. It also implies that we are not creative gent need. 

A good example of this latter definition is the US prescription drug market. Many argue in support of high costs that research, development, and marketing are all expensive and drive consumer prices up. It follows that without a financial incentive, there would be no innovation.  

While this phrase doesn’t solely point to financial incentives being the holy grail of creativity, it is a common belief in today’s market.

The transition from necessity to luxury

My current quest is to learn ‘what happened’ in human history between the end of the last glaciation period and Egypt. We know surprisingly little about this era between ~12,000 and 5,000 years ago, but a lot must have transpired. 

Certainly, one of the things that happened is the evolution of the human nervous system. Our brains and supporting nervous tissues became more complex. As a result, our ability to interact with our environments — and each other — expanded greatly. Many believe this led to more elaborate social structures, villages, communities, and cities. It isn’t hard to imagine codes, rules, and governments followed suit.

This transition is commonly described as a shift from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to more sedentary agricultural clusterings. Like the term ’savage,’ this greatly oversimplifies and insults our ancestry. At the very least, the leap from some extreme ancestor to an Egyptian pharaoh was not likely to be so sudden.

Less difficult to imagine is a transition between simply surviving and a state where we have surplus time. Once we mastered food and shelter, the opportunity for luxury arose. 

Natural selection would have initially ‘rewarded’ individuals able to procure the necessities. The necessity to survive was the mother of invention when meeting our most basic needs. Individuals creative enough to solve the food and shelter problems would have enough surplus energy to reproduce and rear children. As these ancestors became more adept at survival and reproduction, they would have time for other activities. 

The availability of surplus time is often overlooked when we skip directly from barely surviving to building pyramids. 

No one will argue that a pyramid is far more luxurious than a cave. But before Egypt, how might we have used this extra time?

Ancestral creativity

Cave paintings come to mind when thinking about early human creativity. While we have evidence of this physical art, we must also consider language, tools, and music. 

Is it hard to imagine early humans experimenting with their voices and hands? Is it any more difficult to think that we enjoyed this? Did our ancestors need to be incentivized to ‘spend’ their newfound luxury time playing around with their evolving nervous systems?

Similarly, experimenting with plant medicines, exploring geography, and pondering the stars seem to be activities likely to stimulate early human curiosity. How could we not wonder? 

I imagine early communication to be integral and even superior to modern language. Imagine how much better we would understand each other if we could only communicate about our needs! There would be less nuance and ambiguity to complicate things, I’d wager. 

Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation

First off, don’t tell me humans will not be creative unless there is a financial motive. It’s disgusting, absurd, and insulting to all organisms who came before us. Did we arrive here, recently evolved, derived from our ancestors, with gluttony our only measurable incentive? Please.

The argument that the only carrots a human will chase are money, status, or power is a backward trip down the evolutionary ladder. If we see ourselves this way, it is the pathway to extinction. We can do better than that. We are better than that. It’s only a matter of perspective.

Most of us agree that humans are social creatures (another tired but truism), we are also creative creatures. Solving problems is our forte. Truly, had early biologists not been so self-centered we may have named our species Homo ingeniosus, ‘imaginative’ instead of ‘wise’ man. Which sounds less egocentric?

Two of the most fascinating elements of evolution are curiosity and imagination. Humans are problem solvers, writ large. This helped us survive cold temperatures, food scarcity, and reproductive challenges. Our ability to imagine what things were like 5–12,000 years ago directly results from this evolution!!! 

Humans don’t need extrinsic motivation. We need a different carrot. 

Curiosity, play, and discovery

Curiosity helps solve problems. We can figure things out if we are motivated to do so. Intrinsic motivation, as determined by natural selection, is ideal. 

Play is a low-pressure approach to directing our curiosity. Look at kids. They don’t just play differently on the playground, children live entirely different lives. That is until we domesticate them to act like us. When play guides curiosity, we avoid the pitfalls of timelines, perfectionism, FOMO, and most other maladaptive characters that result from extrinsic motivation. Play is king.

Discovery is the mechanism of solutions. Curiosity drives us to learn and understand. Play provides a reasonable approach to implementing curiosity that doesn’t diminish the desire to solve the problem. Discovery is the realization of something novel. A new way of doing. New symbols. New sounds. New tools. Even new cures for cancer (gasp!). 

Apologies to Plato, Linnaeus, and all the others who spoke of our savage ancestors and their extrinsic motivations. It’s ok to be wrong. Most of y’all missed that critical point. 

This article was brought to you by the question, ‘What happened’?