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166 Creativity

ends must similarly describe the mechanisms by which an invention at the
cognitive level is translated into change at a higher system level. This is a
brain-straining exercise that the cognitive psychologist with relief hands back
to his colleagues in the economic, social and historical sciences.

THE ULTIMATE SYSTEM LEVEL

Beyond history, at the evolutionary time band, the unit of analysis is the species.
Our evolutionary ancestor Homo erectus, although superficially similar to our-
selves, moved from one type of stone tool to a slightly more sophisticated type of
stone tool in approximately one and a half million years, a rate of invention that
compares rather unfavorably with the technological advances of our own spe-
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cies over the past 2,000 years. The ability to produce novelty on a regular basis
is itself a novelty, one of the raisins in the hominid phylogeny. The record from
our pre-history strongly suggests that this novelty coincided with the emergence
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of the representational mind. Once human beings could represent, they could
thereby also re-represent. This novelty came about through mutation and natural
selection. These change processes differ utterly in their operation and material
implementation from the mechanisms of novelty production at the cognitive,
collective and historical levels. Nevertheless, biological evolution also proceeds
through punctuated equilibria, alternating periods of stasis and change: “The
history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic
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equilibria, disturbed. … by rapid and episodic events of speciation.” Biological
species spend most of their life in a state of stable adaptation to their environ-
ment. Speciation and extinction occupy periods of time that are short, relative
to the total lifetime of the species. Alteration in mode and tempo is the ulti-
mate pattern in the production of novelty, perhaps the only pattern that recurs
at every level of time and complexity and at every system size.