"the collective mind is primed in a way it’s never been before.”

Why You Aren’t as Creative as You’d Like to Think

• BY JEFFREY MARLOW
• You’re a smart person: a believer in science, an acolyte of technology, a 21st century citizen. So answer this: Could you, and you alone, make something as simple as a pencil?
  Mark Pagel doesn’t think so. In a presentation at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin, the evolutionary biologist offered this very thought experiment – pencil manufacturing, after all, involves graphite mining and refining, wood harvesting and processing, machining, rubber harvesting, and many other intricate processes.
  His conclusion: “In our everyday lives, we’re asked to make decisions about things about which we have very little understanding and very little knowledge.” From writing utensils to mortgages and cars or frozen chicken, we’re largely disconnected from the processes that generate the things we use. “If we’re honest with ourselves,” Pagel continued, “most of us are just glorified karaoke singers in most aspects of our lives, using things that other people have made and we don’t really understand.”
  But before you get too discouraged or sign up for a furniture making class, take solace in the fact that this ignorance is nothing new. We propagate most practices for generations for the simple reason that “it’s always been this way.” And yet, for a species of copycats, we humans have come up with some pretty remarkable things over the millennia. How has this been possible? Where do these innovations come from?
  Our collective mythology subscribes to what Pagel labels “the great thinker view of innovation – if we just think long and hard enough, a flash of inspiration will come into our mind.” But it’s just not true: “There are virtually no great leaps. Almost all technology builds on previous technology.”
  In place of the lone genius theory, Pagel traces the sum of human ingenuity to a simple three-step process: copy, modify, combine. Taking small iterative steps away from the current paradigm and connecting disparate streams of thought, that’s where the magic happens. It’s the same process that evolution has exploited for billions of years, by replicating DNA (copy) with a set error rate (modify) and genetic recombination (combine).
  It’s also the same process that can forms the real story behind the “great thinker.” Thomas Edison, for example, didn’t create the light bulb with a single stroke of genius, but rather modified previous versions and made a longer-lasting bulb filament. As with DNA mutations, most deviations from the template will be counter-productive, but with enough people trying enough slight modifications, human technology progresses at a sufficient rate.
  So how does this mode of innovation hold up in the 21st century? Pagel offers both pessimism and hope. On the downside, the ease of information access endangers our critical reasoning: “If we think Google will do our thinking for us,” he warned, “the internet might make us stupid.” On the other hand, globalization and our unprecedented connectedness may prepare us well to conquer global challenges like resource scarcity, poverty, and climate change. “The world is connected in a way that it’s never been connected before,” said Pagel, “so the collective mind is primed in a way it’s never been before.”
• http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/why-you-arent-as-creative-as-you-like-to-think/