Innovation in the collective brain

Abstract

One contribution of 15 to a theme issue 'Innovation in animals and humans: understanding the origins and development of novel and creative behaviour'. Innovation is often assumed to be the work of a talented few, whose products are passed on to the masses. Here, we argue that innovations are instead an emergent property of our species' cultural learning abilities, applied within our societies and social networks. Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. We outline how many human brains, which evolved primarily for the acquisition of culture, together beget a collective brain. Within these collective brains, the three main sources of innovation are serendipity, recombination and incremental improvement. We argue that rates of innovation are heavily influenced by (i) sociality, (ii) transmission fidelity, and (iii) cultural variance. We discuss some of the forces that affect these factors. These factors can also shape each other. For example, we provide preliminary evidence that transmission efficiency is affected by sociality-languages with more speakers are more efficient. We argue that collective brains can make each of their constituent cultural brains more innovative. This perspective sheds light on traits, such as IQ, that have been implicated in innovation. A collective brain perspective can help us understand otherwise puzzling findings in the IQ literature, including group differences, heritability differences and the dramatic increase in IQ test scores over time.

Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies

“…This is important because a major distinction between biology and culture/technology is the latter's (apparent) goal-oriented, rapid generation and filtering of ideas and inventions (the sensory and cognition box in figure 1; see also [100]). Indeed, there is evidence that some innovations in culture/technology stem from serendipitous events [101,102]. In biology, novelties are similarly difficult if not impossible to predict [103,104].…”

“…-Innovations and population growth are expected to be mutually reinforcing. Features of a population including its size, social interactions and established standards [102,105,106] influence the probability of innovation. Innovation may foster ecological opportunity, which in turn promotes population expansion and adaptive radiation [14,107].…”

Adaptable individuals and innovative lineages

“…The strange history of hominin evolution suggests that the array of innovations we see in a population at a time, and in a lineage through time, is not a simple reflection of the adaptive capacities of the individuals in the target population. This is the central message of Muthukrishna & Henrich [8]. They offer a radical, distributed cognitive theory of innovation as the product of 'collective brains'.…”

Untitled

“…Further still, it was Cora's husband, Rodel, who initiated finding an alternative to a tarpaulin sheet to provide the shade needed to address her health concern; Rodel obtained the inspiration to build a vine curtain from his kin: his brother-in-law in Manila. Social relations are therefore not only significant; they are fundamental to cognitive innovation and improvisation Geertz, 1973;Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2016).…”

“…(Denham & Punt, 2017, supplement, p. 4) I build on , Hallam and Ingold (2017) in underlining the significance of socio-cultural resources in cognitive innovation (and by extension creativity, particularly in an improvisational sense), which are not adjuncts to, but constituents of, mental activity (Geertz, 1973, pp. 73-74;Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2016).…”