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.It is not surprising that as we ride the crest of evolution we have taken over the title of creator.Whether this transformation will help the human race or cause its downfall is not yet clear.It would help if we realized the awesome responsibility of this new role.The gods of the ancients, like Shiva, like Yehova, were both builders and destroyers.The universe endured in a precarious balance between their mercy and their wrath.The world we inhabit today also teeters between becoming either the lovely garden or the barren desert that our contrary impulses strive to bring about.The desert is likely to prevail if we ignore the potential for destruction our stewardship implies and go on abusing blindly our new-won powers.While we cannot foresee the eventual results of creativity—of the attempt to impose our desires on reality, to become the main power that decides the destiny of every form of life on the planet—at least we can try to understand better what this force is and how it works.Because for better or for worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity.The result will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.This book, which attempts to bring together thirty years of research on how creative people live and work, is an effort to make more understandable the mysterious process by which men and women come up with new ideas and new things.My work in this area has convinced me that creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen.Just as the sound of a tree crashing in the forest is unheard if nobody is there to hear it, so creative ideas vanish unless there is a receptive audience to record and implement them.And without the assessment of competent outsiders, there is no reliable way to decide whether the claims of a self-styled creative person are valid.According to this view, creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation.All three are necessary for a creative idea, product, or discovery to take place.For instance, in Vera Rubin’s account of her astronomical discovery, it is impossible to imagine it without access to the huge amount of information about celestial motions that has been collecting for centuries, without access to the institutions that control modern large telescopes, without the critical skepticism and eventual support of other astronomers.In my view these are not incidental contributors to individual originality but essential components of the creative process, on a par with the individual’s own contributions.For this reason, in this book I devote almost as much attention to the domain and to the field as to the individual creative persons.Creativity is the cultural equivalent of the process of genetic changes that result in biological evolution, where random variations take place in the chemistry of our chromosomes, below the threshold of consciousness.These changes result in the sudden appearance of a new physical characteristic in a child, and if the trait is an improvement over what existed before, it will have a greater chance to be transmitted to the child’s descendants.Most new traits do not improve survival chances and may disappear after a few generations.But a few do, and it is these that account for biological evolution.In cultural evolution there are no mechanisms equivalent to genes and chromosomes.Therefore, a new idea or invention is not automatically passed on to the next generation.Instructions for how to use fire, or the wheel, or atomic energy are not built into the nervous system of the children born after such discoveries.Each child has to learn them again from the start.The analogy to genes in the evolution of culture are memes, or units of information that we must learn if culture is to continue.Languages, numbers, theories, songs, recipes, laws, and values are all memes that we pass on to our children so that they will be remembered.It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the culture.Therefore, to understand creativity it is not enough to study the individuals who seem most responsible for a novel idea or a new thing.Their contribution, while necessary and important, is only a link in a chain, a phase in a process.To say that Thomas Edison invented electricity or that Albert Einstein discovered relativity is a convenient simplification.It satisfies our ancient predilection for stories that are easy to comprehend and involve superhuman heroes.But Edison’s or Einstein’s discoveries would be inconceivable without the prior knowledge, without the intellectual and social network that stimulated their thinking, and without the social mechanisms that recognized and spread 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