9 Things Evolution and Natural Selection Taught Me About the Creative Process
I’ve spent the past few days reading Daniel Lieberman’s “Story of the Human Body.” The book is an attempt to create a somewhat clear picture of the origins of the human body and infer what purpose and environment it was built for.
I’ve always believed that life is the ultimate creator; the sheer number and variety of living creatures that have existed and still exist is a testament to this fact. As I read through the first few chapters of this treatise on evolution, I realized that there were parallels to be drawn between the randomness of life’s origin and the creative process. The resulting conclusions are the fruits of my thoughts on natural selection, human insignificance, and prolific creation.
1. Creative work is inherently hit or miss:
Variation in species is the mechanism by which evolution is kick started. A slight variation that proves advantageous to survival (e.g. a lion that can run faster than other lions is more likely to catch more prey) has a higher chance of being passed on to future generations. However, not all these variations are advantageous; a giraffe that’s shorter than other giraffes will suffer when food is scarce and so on. The same goes for creative work: there is no sure way to know if your work will click, you either fail or succeed.
2. The misses outweigh the hits:
The number of species that currently exist, pales in comparison with the total number of animal species that have ever existed. 200,000 years ago, there were multiple human species, but only one of those survived to become modern day humans. As a creative most of your work will not make it very far, your major successes will most likely be a small fraction of all the work you’ve ever done, unless of course, you’re one of them chosen ones who turn everything they touch to gold.
3. Despite this, life is prolific AF:
Life never stops creating. This isn’t to say life has a personality or anything, but the point is the life process never pauses. Death of an organism does not put an end to the evolution of its species. The life process continues and takes hold of every opportunity to turn out a product. Every extinction provides a clean slate to experiment with. Life can’t cling to results, and it is because of this ruthless relentlessness that we exist today. Because of the inherent hit and miss factor of creative work, real progress can only be made if large volumes of work are turned out. Skill can only be refined if it is continually used. The most successful artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Michael Jackson and so on, were usually the most prolific.
It’s impossible to be as prolific as the life process itself, still, if we can let go of our emotional attachments to things like comfort, ease, and fundamentalism; let go of our fear of drudgery, pain and frustration, and free our minds from outcome dependent thinking, we’ll see serious progress in our creative output.
4. Creativity is inspired by opposition:
Variation is the catalyst for evolution and natural selection is the medium by which evolved traits are passed along. Natural selection is simply another way of saying that nature tests the usefulness of an evolved trait. These tests exhibit themselves as challenges, in fact to quote Daniel Leiberman: “Just as the tough get going when the going gets tough, natural selection acts most strongly not during times of plenty, but during times of stress and scarcity.”
These hardships and the traits that scale through define the future of a species; simple life forms evolved to be complex, highly varied organisms because of the various challenges the environment presented. In creative work, resistance, rejection and the obstacles we face play a huge part in training us. These supposed evils are actually stimulants, allies challenging us to express our nature as problem solvers, friends urging us to do better, to think deeply, to study and to innovate. If there were no challenges, evolution would be irrelevant, because there would be no problem to rise above.
5. Evolution prioritizes the species over the individual:
The death of an individual is insignificant, the evolution of the species is the ultimate goal. While this decries the value of the individual, this insight also gives us a way to deal with failure. The demise of a single project is less important than your progression as an artist, you are the product, the projects you do are only necessarily to help you refine the skill you carry.
6. Ironically evolution itself is driven by individuals:
Evolution originates from the trait of a single individual or a bunch of individuals. Species as a whole do not evolve automatically, the evolution starts from a few members and is gradually spread by natural selection till it becomes a species wide trait. Popular art isn’t the best art, trends don’t dictate the future, the masses are usually clueless when it comes to deciding what they like. Your job as a creator is to produce as much as you can, get constructive feedback from tests, and use the feedback to carry out new experiments as repeatedly as you can.
7. It takes time to reach mastery:
It took billions of years of trial and error, for life to become what it is. You’re not going to become Picasso overnight, so you might as well be in for the long haul.
8. That said, mastery is an ongoing process that can never be reached:
We’ve come a long way from being single celled organisms, but we still have a long way to go. We’re still evolving as a species. Same with your art, you can never reach perfection, there are always new methods to experiment with, new mediums to explore and better ways to tell old stories.
9. The environment plays a huge part:
If a trait is not adapted for the environment the individual lives in, then there’s a high chance that individual won’t survive. Creativity relies heavily on context, know your market, be connected to your audience; genius does not exist in isolation; innovation is only innovation because it is useful to the masses.
There’s a lot I left out, but if there’s anything you should take away from this it’s that life is fucking prolific, it is endlessly churning out new iterations, endlessly experimenting. Don’t let your mind grow old, let your curiosity drive you, let your discipline sustain you, and open yourself up to whatever may come. You might never reach genius, but you’ll definitely strike gold. Peace.
