The Origins Of Creativity By Edward Wilson

Science is dead without the philosophical wherewithal to decide that exploration and understanding are worth pursuing. The motivation for scientific study is, first and foremost, metaphysical, and bio-philosophy has historically aimed to answer a set of certain repeat questions more than others. One such question pertains to the origins of phenomena of the human mind like logic, language and creativity. Where do they fall on the evolutionary timeline and why? A new book attempts to dive into that question and provide as thorough an answer as possible. Harvard University’s godfather of bio-philosophy, Edward Wilson, is 88 years old, and he’s just penned, The Origins of Creativity.

The text is bubbling over with meandering pontifications as Wilson waxes on the subject, but all his ideas remain anchored to the theory of evolution and are centralized around genetics. He threads these things together with the belief that creativity and culture can both be traced back to genetics. He takes creativity itself back to the prehistoric, African savannah. It is widely accepted that prehistoric hominids were initially vapid, asocial herbivores, and Wilson makes the argument that the transition to eating meat was critical to man’s development. It led human beings having to hunt animals, which they eventually did in groups upon realizing the need to help one another, and that necessitated the development of social behaviors for the sake of sound cooperation.

As such, natural selection debatably began to favor symbolic language, and suddenly, what we call the humanities was born. These were the building blocks of storytelling and, as Wilson describes it, the “nocturnal firelight of the earliest human