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The Production of Novelty 71

tend to work hard and invest enormous effort into their projects. Furthermore,
it is a matter of historical record that many famous novelties in the areas of art,
science and technology emerged out of processes that lasted orders of magni-
tude longer than the time it takes to have a new idea. (The duration of creative
processes is discussed in Chapter 5.)
an accumulation theory of creativity has to specify the repertoire of steps
that are available to the creative agent, the mechanism for choosing each suc-
cessive step and the principle by which the outcomes of the steps accumulate.
These components can be articulated in different ways, not all equally viable.
Unlike generate-and-test theories, accumulation theories emphasize that cre-
ative solutions consist of long sequences of coordinated actions. The questions
of what is creative about creative thinking, about direction and about limita-
tions acquire somewhat different flavors when applied to the individual steps.

accumulation Through variation-Selection?

When an idea initially assessed as promising turns out to be a dead end, there
are only two responses: Give up or try again. The possibility of failure coupled
with the willingness to persist implies that a creative process necessarily exhib-
its a cyclic structure: generate; evaluate; repeat as needed. The ability to execute
the generate-and-test cycle repeatedly relieves the process from the need to be
infallible, or even nearly so. But running it again is of no use if it produces the
same output as before. The point of trying again is to try something different,
to vary the approach.
inspiration for a theory based on cyclic processes, variations and stepwise accu-
mulation was provided by Poincaré’s contemporary, Charles Darwin. according to
his natural selection theory of how novelty emerges in the living world, genetic
processes produce offspring that vary in minor ways from their parents and the
environment acts as a selective filter, allowing some variations to reproduce more
often than others, which alters the relative frequencies of the relevant genes by
some amount from one generation to the next. it takes many generations – that
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is, many cycles of genetic variation followed by environmental selection – to accu-
mulate enough genetic change to bring forth a novel adaptation.
The temptation to draw an analogy between biological and mental evo-
lution is strong, in part because natural selection has the advantage of being
a proven mechanism for the production of novelty. in an influential review
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published in 1960, social scientist Donald t. Campbell documented applica-
tions of the variation-selection principle to different aspects of psychology,