Chapter 4 - Dimension III: Getting It Right

Summary

Most definitions of creativity foreground novelty or originality. But if we look at how nature solves tricky problems, we discover several interesting things. Successful problem solving tends to be parsimonious (simple, economic or elegant) such as the wax cakes built by bee colonies. The number of basic solutions to such tricky problems of how to design an eye, how to fly and how to make a functioning radar system, are relatively few and have been rediscovered again and again ( a pattern discovered by Richard Dawkins). The fact that nature tends to reuse basic anatomical designs (mammals, birds, reptiles) again and again (common descent, homology) is also a case of parsimony or getting it right. This can be seen as a case of co-evolution but of an intra-species kind. Popper’s and Baxandall’s concepts of how problem situations constrain problem solvers is yet another version of getting it right.