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160 Creativity

greatly that feedback can have that effect. However, group problem solving
also exhibits emerging mechanisms: the parallelism of search that becomes
possible in a collective, the contributions of diverse backgrounds, the imposi-
tion of inappropriate presuppositions by authority, the impact of public feed-
back and the replacement of group members. These have no counterparts at
the individual level.

MERGING TIME AND COLLECTIVITY

Only so much can be accomplished in a few years; indeed, only so much can be
accomplished in a lifetime. Creative processes extend beyond that limit. In the
300 years since Newton, physics has been a highly cumulative enterprise, pro-
ducing a stack of experimental techniques, findings and theories in which each
new layer of knowledge rests upon and synthesizes the previous ones. The entire
advance from pre-Newtonian to post-Einsteinian physics could not have been
completed in the course of a single lifetime; the cognitive distance is too great.
Similar observations hold for mathematics, technology and other creative fields.
Music is perhaps the most cumulative of all the arts, with an unbroken tradition
that extends back into pre-history. Humanity could not have advanced from an
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absence of music to Mozart’s compositions in the course of a single lifetime.
A team can only be so large if it is to be held together by person-to- person
communication. But the production of novelty might require yet larger collec-
tives. There are more than 100,000 aerospace engineers in the United States
alone, many of them involved in the invention of novel technologies for,
among other activities, space exploration. The total number of U.S. biologists
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exceeds 80,000, U.S. chemists number more than 100,000, and U.S. physicists
top 150,000. The arts are not far behind in numbers. More than 200,000 indi-
viduals in the United States state their occupation as “artist,” more than 30,000
as “actor,” and as many as 170,000 as “musician or singer.” The corresponding
numbers for the world as a whole would obviously be significantly greater. The
production of novelty transcends the boundaries of creative collectives.
The upper levels of time and collectivity merge in history. There are many
types of creative collectives that are too large to be called organizations and
exist longer than a single generation. An example is the academic discipline, a
community of researchers that overrides geographical and cultural boundar-
ies, counts thousands of members and accumulates work on a set of shared
problems over centuries. Philosophy is the undisputed grand old dame in this
company. Contemporary philosophers are almost annoyingly articulate about
how their own work relates to the works of their predecessors 2,000 years