REJOINDER: Picasso's Guernica Creativity as a Darwinian Process: Definitions, Clarifications, Misconceptions, and Applications

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REJOINDER: Picasso's Guernica Creativity as aDarwinian Process: Definitions, Clarifications,Misconceptions, and ApplicationsDean Keith SimontonPublished online: 08 Jun 2010.

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Picasso’s Guernica Creativity as a Darwinian Process: Definitions,Clarifications, Misconceptions, and Applications

Dean Keith SimontonUniversity of California, Davis

ABSTRACT: The author responds to four commen-taries on Simonton (this issue). The response dealswith two sets of issues. First are criticisms of theDarwinian theory of creativity, especially as appliedto Picasso’s sketches for the Guernica. These criti-cisms range from the presumed role of associativeprocesses to the essential nature of any Darwinianmodel. The second set of issues pertains to diversemethodological objections with respect to measure-ment and data analysis. The author responds to eachand every point. The author concludes not only thatPicasso’s creative process is best described asDarwinian, but also that the Darwinian theory ofcreativity has been notably strengthened by thecurrent exchange.

Because my article on Picasso’s Guernica wasinspired by controversy, it is not surprising thatit provoked such a diverse set of responses. Forthe same reason, I am grateful to have the opport-unity to write this reply. Given that Picasso’s mas-terpiece has elicited so much debate, it is great tohave the chance to keep the discussion going. Per-haps this contentious conversation might eventu-ally lead to some resolution of the issues . . . andperhaps not. One of the lessons to be discernedfrom the history of psychology is that controver-sies do not seem to be handled the same way ascontroversies are resolved in the natural sciences.For some time, physicists debated whether lightwas transmitted as waves or as particles. The issuewas settled by concluding not only that light hadboth wave and particle properties, but also thateven particles had wavelengths! In psychology,

by contrast, we still seem to operate according toan either–or principle. In fact, the most eminentpsychologists tend to be those who adopt themost extreme positions on the theoretical andmethodological disputes that divide the discipline(Simonton, 2000b). If physicists adopted the samemodus operandi, they would still be arguing aboutwhether light constitutes a wave or particlephenomenon!

Let me treat the four commentaries in the fol-lowing order: Weisberg and Hass (this issue),Mumford and Antes (this issue), Gabora (thisissue), and Beghetto and Plucker (this issue).

Weisberg and Hass

It is natural to begin with Weisberg and Hass(this issue), because this article is longer than allof the others combined. As a consequence, it raisesmore issues. Better yet, the first author has per-sonal experience conducting research on theGuernica sketches (Weisberg, 2004). This placeshim in a unique position relative to the other com-mentators. In fact, because my article was, in part,a response to his earlier investigation, this com-ment can be considered a reply to my response.Finally, he has been criticizing the Darwinian per-spective on creativity far longer than any of theother commentators (e.g., Weisberg, 2000), andso his views show far greater insight into the

Correspondence should be sent to Dean Keith Simonton,

Department of Psychology, One Shields Avenue, University

of California, Davis, CA 95616-8686. E-mail: dksimonton@

ucdavis.edu

Creativity Research Journal2007, Vol. 19, No. 4, 381–394

Copyright # 2007 byLawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

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nature of the issues. Because of that asset, he has ahigher likelihood of having better reasons forbelieving that he is right.

In any case, their comments can be placed inthree categories: criticisms of the specific investi-gation, criticisms of the general theory, and criti-cisms of free association.

Criticisms of the Specific Investigation

After their introductory remarks on a Darwiniantheory of creativity and its application to Picasso’sGuernica, Weisberg and Hass (this issue) start theirformal critique by raising two relatively minorpoints regarding my study. The first concerns myuse of the adjective objective to describe my mea-sures of the progress that each sketch makestoward the final product. Yet a close examinationof my usage makes it clear that I tend to use theword in a relative sense. I describe Weisberg’s(2004) assessments as being more objective thanearlier work, and my assessments as more objec-tive than Weisberg’s. Without delving into all sortsof difficult epistemological and ontological ques-tions—such as whether there exists an omnipresentand omniscient perceiver—may it suffice to saythat there is no such thing as absolute objectivity.Instead, objectivity is an asymptote that our mea-surements approach has we average over largenumbers of subjective judgments. The main differ-ence between psychometrics and measurement inthe so-called exact sciences is that the error vari-ance is smaller, and therefore precise measure-ments can be made using fewer observers orobservations. It must be remembered that Bessel’s1822 ‘‘personal equation’’ was specifically intro-duced to account for human subjectivity in eventhe most basic astronomical observations (viz.,the precise timing of specific stellar events).

The second criticism of my investigation con-cerns the issue of backtracking, that is, whenPicasso appears to retreat to earlier sketches whenreaching the work’s final form. According toWeisberg and Hass (this issue), such backtrackingcan be partly attributed to occasions when Picassowould work on one figure for a bit before turningto another figure that was in a less developed state.Because I am said to have failed to separateout within-category backtracking, I must have

overestimated the amount of backtracking. Theerror of this statement will be apparent to anyonewho reads the original article. A whole section hasthe heading ‘‘Sketches Separated by IndividualFigure.’’ In this section, I examine the sketch pro-gressions for six major figures. The conclusions ofthe statistical analyses are reinforced by the sixgraphs presented in Figure 4 (Simonton, thisissue). It should be apparent upon inspection thatall six of the within-category comparisons exhibitbacktracking to some extent. Although theamount of backtracking varies appreciably fromfigure to figure, in not a single case is the lastsketch the one most proximate to the image thatappears in the final painting. Hence, this criticismhas no merit whatsoever.

Criticisms of the General Theory

After these two comments on the study itself,Weisberg and Hass then turn to theoretical issues.Like Solomon in the Old Testament, they proclaimthat they can solve the problem before them bycutting the Darwinian baby in half. On the onehand, they are willing to accept that the creativeprocess is in a certain sense ‘‘blind.’’ Even better,they go so far as to suggest that creativity is soinherently blind that the issue might be raisedabout whether this statement has any empiricalcontent. A claim once thought absurd is thus ren-dered obvious—a shift in interpretation that mayrepresent a brilliant example of hindsight bias inaction! On the other hand, they take issue withwhat they hold to represent an independent claimof Darwinian theory, namely, that the creativeprocess requires remote, rather than everyday,associations. Then they devote much space toexplaining why creativity cannot depend exclus-ively on free association. Naturally, these argu-ments purport to kill this part of the baby. Theonly problem is that Weisberg and Hass did notsplit the baby in two. They only cut off oneappendage and said it represented half.

Fortunately, Solomon’s baby was not split intwo. Nor does Darwinian theory need to be so div-ided. It soon became apparent to me that the com-mentators failed to take into serious considerationany of my most recent writings on this subject(e.g., Simonton, 2005), including even the target

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article (Simonton, this issue). The emphasis seemsto have been placed on a book chapter publishedover a dozen years ago (Simonton, 1995).Although they acknowledge that my ideas haveevolved over the years in which I have been devel-oping this theory, they did not appreciate theimplications of those modifications and elabora-tions. I found it especially frustrating thatWeisberg and Hass all but ignored my 2005 articleon ‘‘Darwin as Straw Man’’ published in this verysame journal. If they had fully accommodated thatarticle’s ideas, they would have had to substan-tially revise their current comment. Rather thanconduct an item-by-item refutation of their rep-resentation of my position, I invite interested read-ers to peruse to that earlier article and then makeup their own minds. In the meantime, I will con-fine myself to reiterating two major points.

First, the only crucial component of a Darwiniantheory is that creativity be contingent on blindvariations (Campbell, 1960; Cziko, 1998). Yetthose variations can come from numerous sources,including many processes that have nothing what-soever to do with remote or free associations. Tooffer an extreme example, if someone systemati-cally searches through all possible permutationsof a set of ideas, concepts, or forms, those permu-tations still count as blind variations. In effect, thisis the very procedure that James Watson used toarrive at the specific base pairings in the molecularmodel of DNA. One of the most importantchanges in my conception of the creative processis the identification of increasingly more mechan-isms that can generate blind variations. Freeassociation and remote association—and pleasenote that these two processes are not equivalent—represent only part of the inventory of cognitiveprocesses that can generate blind variations.Hence, creativity can be Darwinian even if it neverinvolves either one of these associative phenomena.

Second, blindness is a quantitative, rather thanqualitative, characteristic. Variations are not eitherblind or not blind, but rather variations vary alonga scale of blindness. At one end of the continuumare variations that are not blind at all, or mini-mally so. This is the level of blindness in manyeveryday problem solving episodes. At the otherend of the continuum are variations that are soblind that they can be considered capricious, even

unpredictable. This level is what one can some-times see in certain types of avant-garde art (e.g.,aleatoric music). Furthermore, several factors gov-ern the magnitude of blindness in a given varia-tional process. One factor is the nature of thevariational procedure itself. For example, algo-rithmic variations are less blind than heuristicvariations, heuristic variations are less blind thanfree- or remote-associative variations, and thelatter are less blind than strictly random varia-tions. A particularly critical factor moderatingthe degree of blindness are the constraints imposedby accumulated expertise. These constraints canintercede in a number of ways. For instance, theconstraints can determine what particular ideas,concepts, or forms enter into the combinatorialhopper. The constraints can also influence howthose ideas, concepts, or forms are combined.Most commonly, some combinations will bebestowed higher a priori probabilities than othercombinations.

Thus, even in those occasions in which creativ-ity is said to have an associative basis, it is neces-sary to recognize that the terms free and remotedo not denote discrete, all-or-none attributes. Inthe former case, free associations can vary accord-ing to the degree of freedom in the associations(e.g., the range of substantive domains covered).For instance, the associations to the description‘‘a five-letter word that means ‘cannot see’’’ aremore restricted than the associations to the con-cept ‘‘love.’’ Similarly, associations can varyaccording to the degree of associative remoteness.For most people blind would most likely be a moreproximate associate of love than words like tennis.

Criticisms of Free Association

Weisberg and Hass then return to the Guernicasketches to argue that Picasso’s creative processcould not have possibly involved free association.Their argument has two parts. In the first part theypresent empirical evidence for the sequentialdependence of his thought trials. But it soonbecomes clear that their demonstration is not ger-mane to the question of free association. Whatthey conclusively prove is that the sketch series isnonrandom. Rather than have his sketches jumparound randomly from figure to figure, Picasso

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would sometimes devote a series of sketches to onefigure, turn to another figure for another fewsketches, and so on. Because all associative pro-cesses are nonrandom, whether they free orremote, we would not expect a random distri-bution of figure categories across the sketch series.On the contrary, even associative processes wouldmost likely yield a series of sketches on a particularfigure before turning to another figure. After all,associations are always associations to something,and most often to some immediate stimulus ormental image. Hence, when Picasso completedone sketch, it may easily stimulate him to conceiveanother sketch that pursues some association orset of associations with respect to the same figure.In any event, because a random association is anoxymoron, this whole statistical exercise is irrel-evant to the point of the argument.

In the second part, Weisberg and Hass attemptto show that Picasso could not have been possiblyengaged in free association because his thoughttrials were not independent of his past history.This argument consists of tracing the antecedentsof various Guernica images to various previousworks. They also mention how the sudden appear-ance and disappearance of wallpaper to the canvascan be traced to his earlier work with collage about25 years earlier. All of this is well and good, but ithas no relevance to the supposed disproof. Theauthors have an odd concept of associative pro-cesses if they believe that they are not contingenton the creator’s past history. From Aristotle tothe British Empiricists to modern psychologistsworking with connectionist and neural-networkmodels, associations have always been seen as cog-nitive linkages that are built up over time throughpersonal experiences in the world. Individuals mayvary in the variety and uniqueness of the associa-tions that they can generate with respect to certainstimuli, but all associations are constructedthrough that experience. So what is critical isthat the graphic elements from Picasso’s past workdid not contribute to the sketch series in anysystematic manner. He certainly did not simplybegin with the images from his The Studio andMinotauromachy—plus Goya’s Disasters ofWar—and then progressively hone them into thefinal product through a series of monotonicimprovements. Therefore, this argument is also

irrelevant to the question of whether free associ-ation participated in Picasso’s creative thought.

Weisberg and Hass’s (this issue) joke about therabbi’s uniformly affirmative response to threecontradictory assertions is a welcome conciliatorygesture. So is, also, the title of their comment,‘‘We Are All Partly Right.’’ There is no doubt thatsome of our disagreements have to do with judg-ments that are highly subjective. For instance, theysee the upraised arm(s) in Sketch #15 as antece-dent to the one that appeared on the initial canvas.At this very moment I am looking at the exactsame sketch and can only conclude that their state-ment counts as an extremely remote association.Other disagreements may involve unavoidablesemantic differences. For example, I am convincedthat they take the word wild as meaning absolutelyrandom, whereas I take the same word as meaningunrestrained, disorderly, and maybe even fantastic—but definitely not random. As a result, we mustnecessarily disagree on whether a few of thePicasso sketches represent ‘‘wild experiments.’’Yet other disagreements may arise from Weisbergand Hass having misunderstood my position. Iwould place in this category their mistaken beliefthat free- and=or remote-associations are essentialingredients of any Darwinian theory of creativity.So, perhaps after a few more exchanges we will alldecide that we are all right. As an example, I hopesome day to convince my critics that free andremote associations do not constitute special orodd mental processes. Indeed, I maintain thatmost people engage in such associative processesevery day of their lives—including Weisberg andHass.

Mumford and Antes

The next commentary strikes me as a littlestrange. The authors have written their commentsnot in direct response to my target article, butrather have conceived their remarks in the contextof the Weisberg and Hass (this issue) commentary.Accordingly, Mumford and Antes (this issue)often specify when they agree and when they dis-agree with Weisberg and Hass with respect to myarticle. Because Mumford and Antes seem one stepremoved from the original article, they sometimes

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end up repeating the errors of Weisberg and Hass.The most striking of these errors is the repetitionof the ideas that (a) my study was devoted to prov-ing that Picasso’s sketches evince a free-associativeprocess and (b) a Darwinian model is predicatedon the assumption that all creativity is based ona free-associative process. Neither of these state-ments is true. Weisberg, Hass, Mumford, andAntes need to peruse the article again—this timevery, very carefully. The only time I even mentionassociative processes is in the introductory sectionwhen I mention a large number of processes thatcan contribute to blind variations. By the timeI get to the section specifically devoted to theGuernica sketches, the words association or associ-ative never again appear in the text—no, not ever,and not anywhere. Instead, my focus throughout isthe distinction between monotonic improvementsand nonmonotonic variants. Besides not readingmy Guernica article very closely, Mumford andAntes evidently did not read my 2005 article in thissame journal. They neither cite it nor exhibitawareness of its contents. Thus, a huge proportionof their commentary is devoted to attacking posi-tions that I do not hold. Like Darwin, I havebecome a straw man!

Rather than an item-by-item reaction to theircommentary, I will focus on two issues: specificcriticisms of the method and general criticisms ofthe theory.

Methodological Criticisms

Mumford and Antes (this issue) raise severalquestions with respect to the methods used in myinvestigation. I will just respond to the followingseven:

1. They argue that I should fit curvilinear, ratherthan linear, models to the data. This would beexcellent advice if it turned out that the progressratings closely approximate the left side ofFigure 1, it is less relevant in light with howthe actual scores turned out. Once the groupcomposition sketches and one initial outliersketch are deleted, the curve is linear with aslope near zero (see Figure 3). In addition, Iestablished specific baselines with respect tothe nonlinear models (viz. rs of .89 and .95 for

complete and truncated series, respectively).But, anyhow, just look at Figures 2–4 andignore the correlation coefficients. The curvesare patently nonmonotonic.

2. They argue that the differences among the sep-arate orderings are not large because the factorloadings range from .78 to .85. But this is notthe appropriate comparison, because these arecorrelations between each rating and the com-posite rating consisting of those same ratings(i.e., part–whole correlations). When each itemis sequentially excluded, then the item–compositecorrelations range from .58 to .74, a muchbigger contrast. More important, it is their indi-vidual correlations with the actual order that isof interest, not how they correlate with eachother. And the latter correlations range from.27 to .66. A chi-square test for the heterogen-eity of the correlations yields 9.95, df ¼ 4,p < .05. Hence, the anti-Darwinist perceivedthe sketches as having a more systematic pro-gression than was actually true.

3. The commentators argue that the judges arebetter able to identify the early sketches, butnot the middle and late sketches. The earlydrawings come almost exclusively from compo-sitional sketches in which each figure was por-trayed in very crude form. Once Picasso beganworking out the details, the ability to determinethe order broke down (compare Figures 2 and3). There is nothing of theoretical significancein this outcome. The progression of the detailedsketches adopts the form of nonmonotonicvariants.

4. The commentators suggest that different resultsmight have been obtained if the judges had spe-cial artistic expertise. This I very much doubt.First of all, the judges were asked to performa very basic task, namely, to order the sketcheson the basis of similarity judgments. The moresimilar a sketch was to the image in the finalproduct, the later in the sequence it was pre-sumed to be placed. In addition, two of thejudges had published articles on the Guernicasketches (Dasgupta, 2004; Weisberg, 2004),one of which was exclusively devoted to thosesketches (Weisberg, 2004). That would implythat these evaluations had a certain level ofexpertise. Finally, the target article contains

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quotes from previous researchers who havebrought even greater expertise to bear on thesesame sketches, and their qualitative conclusionsare consistent with my quantitative inferences(Arnheim, 1962; Gombrich, 1969).

5. They say that Weisberg and Hass (this issue)claimed that Guernica can be viewed as a col-lage, but that is not how I read their commen-tary. Picasso seems to have toyed with theidea briefly at the canvas stage, but then relin-quished the idea. Moreover, the collage aspectdid not concern the figures themselves, butrather how the areas defined by the figures wereto be filled in. In addition, the repeated creationof compositional sketches shows that he wasthinking of the painting as a whole with inte-grated parts. All in all, I cannot see how thiscomment is relevant.

6. The commentators assert that I have somehowconflated two levels of analysis, the individualcreator and the creative product. It seems theyhave confused the acquisition of expertise withthe application of expertise. The former takesplace at the level of the individual, whereasthe latter takes place at the level of the work.The curve at the left of Figure 1 in Simonton(this issue) is schematic representation of thelatter, not the former. I thought this was madeclear when I described what the sketches wouldlook like if they were totally expertise driven. Soit may be sufficient to note that this criticism isplain wrong.

7. Mumford and Antes (this issue) maintain that Iseem inclined to make ‘‘sweeping . . . conclusions’’(p. 368) from this single case study. After all,the Guernica sketches were produced by just asingle creator and they contributed to theemergence of a single creative product. Surely,an N ¼ 1 study cannot be generalized to all actsof creativity. I agree completely. But that com-ment ignores the context in which this debatebegan. It all started when I used the sketchesas a brief illustration of Darwinian creativity(Simonton, 1999). Weisberg (2004) counteredwith his study that claimed to contradict thisassertion. In the same year Dasgupta (2004)identified Guernica as one of three test cases inevaluating whether creativity was Darwinian.From these two challenges arose the

investigation reported in the target article. Yetit should be obvious from reading any of mypublications on this subject that the Darwiniantheory is based on far more than the sketches. Iargue that the theory provides the best theoreti-cal model for coordinating the vast literatureregarding the cognitive, developmental, differ-ential, and social psychology of creativity(Simonton, 1999). To criticize me on this pointis like taking Charles Darwin to task for talkingabout the Gal�aapagos finches.

Theoretical Criticisms

Mumford and Antes (this issue) raise severalissues regarding the theoretical basis of my investi-gation, but once I strip away their misconceptionsabout the place of associative processes in theDarwinian theory, much less remains to discuss.I make only three points.

First, the commentators base most of theirarguments on the results of laboratory experi-ments in which college undergraduates engage inproblem solving tasks. Mumford and Antes donot provide any information about the numberof successful solutions that were patented or pub-lished, that won international prizes like theNobel, or that have gone down in history as mas-terpieces or breakthroughs. I assume that omissionis because none of the undergraduates generatedproducts of that caliber. This reply might seemfrivolous until we recognize that it is routine inthe field to distinguish between little c and Big Ccreativity (Simonton, 2000a; see also Beghetto &Plucker, this issue). The psychological processesunderlying little-c creativity studied in laboratoryexperiments using college undergraduates cannotautomatically be assumed to be identical to thosebehind the Big C creativity displayed in, say,Picasso’s Guernica. In fact, I have repeatedlyargued over the past 20 years that Darwinian pro-cesses are most likely to be seen in acts of creativegenius (e.g., Simonton, 1988, 1999). So until theselaboratory experiments are replicated for Big Cproducts, one has to be suspicious of the relevanceof the extended extrapolation.

Second, the authors point to the prominentplace that analogical thinking often has in creative

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thinking. This point is ironic for two reasons. Inthe first place, I have argued long ago that anal-ogies frequently play an important role in theblind-variation process (e.g., Simonton, 1988).Analogies, metaphors, and models are ideationalvariants that serve the function of using onewell-known phenomenon (e.g., water waves) toexplicate a more obscure phenomenon (e.g., lightpropagation). These applications always havesome degree of blindness, because we can neveranticipate in advance how well the comparisonswill actually work. The history of science is repletewith cases of once promising analogies that ulti-mately failed (e.g., heat as a fluid). In addition,associative processes have a critical role to playin the generation of analogies, metaphors, andmodels. I believe that my critics often overlookthe fact that one of the fundamental principlesbehind association is similarity—a point firstnoted by Aristotle! Analogical reasoning is contin-gent on the recognition of the similarity betweenrelations among elements that make up both sidesof the comparison. Consequently, the emergenceof highly original analogies may require the par-ticipation of highly original associations that linkphenomena that would otherwise be seen as quitedisparate (e.g., the atomic nucleus and its electronsis like the sun and its planets). So to explain crea-tivity using analogy is to explain creativity usingassociation.

Third and last, the commentators held that Ihave failed in my search for the ‘‘one true process’’This remark, more than any other, betrays theirmisapprehension of my one true position. In con-trast, I have championed the Darwinian theoryof creativity precisely because I do not believe itpossible to attribute major acts of creativity toany single process! Because I think that creativityis far too complex to be explained by any onemechanism, I maintain that it is necessary to intro-duce a superordinate or meta-process that sub-sumes all of the separate mechanisms thathave been proffered in the literature (see, e.g.,Simonton, in press). That process is the blind vari-ation of processes. There are numerous routes totackling any given creative problem. There arestrong methods and weak methods, diverse algo-rithms and varied heuristics, deductive and induc-tive approaches, free and remote associations,

Janusian and homospatial thinking, divergentand even convergent thought, openness to experi-ence and defocused attention, various analogies,metaphors, models, and case-based methods, aswell as just plain serendipity. To be sure, for sim-ple and mundane problems, such as finding theintegral of a mathematical function, the numberof available methods may be very small, perhapsonly one or two. But as problems increase in com-plexity and novelty, the number of potentialapproaches enlarges proportionately. And it isnot just that their number increases but also thattheir respective a priori probabilities of successbecome more equal. In other words, it becomesincreasingly difficult to determine the optimalapproach, leaving no other alternative but to tryout alternative tactics more or less blindly. Thisvariation in processes is especially likely to berequired for genius-grade, Big C creativity. It isfor this reason that major breakthroughs are oftenpreceded by long incubation periods punctuatedby ‘‘false starts and wild experiments’’ (Simonton,1999, p. 197). It may take some time to identify theone process that works best. If a one true processcan be said to exist, it must be this meta-cognitivevariation in variation-generating mechanisms.And this would yield the nomonotonic variantsexamined in the target article.

Gabora

Gabora’s (this issue) comments are refreshingchange from the previous two. Her objections tothe target article stem from a different set of con-cerns. Furthermore, few of her criticisms come asany surprise. Some time ago, she and I exchangeda series of e-mails expressing our disagreementsover a Darwinian theory of creativity. The factthat we never resolved that debate suggests thatwe will not do so here as well. As a result, this por-tion of my reply is directed more at CreativityResearch Journal (CRJ ) readers than at Gabora.She and I have agreed to disagree, and we prob-ably always will.

She commences her commentary by making thesame mistake as Weisberg and Hass (this issue)with respect to backtracking. Except in the casesof the composition sketches, Picasso could not

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help but work on one component at a time. Then,in a sense, each time he turned to another (presum-ably less developed component) he might have tobacktrack. Yet as already pointed out, this necess-ity cannot explain within-category backtracking. IfPicasso stands at point A with respect to some fig-ural element and wants to get to point G, and ifABCDEFG represents the most logical sequencewith respect to similarity criteria, then why wouldPicasso get to G via FDCEB rather than BCDEF ?Moreover, upon further reflection, I am no longerconvinced that cross-category backtracking can beso easily dismissed. If Picasso had progressed frompoint A1 to point D1 for figure 1, say, and decidedto turn to figure 2, would he really have to start atpoint B2 with respect to the latter? Unless his cre-ative intellect is utterly blind, why couldn’t helaunch the sketches for the latter figure where heleft off at the first, namely, at point D2? Forinstance, Weisberg and Hass discussed howPicasso went through a sequence of first addingand then subtracting tears on the faces of theanguished women in the painting. Once the artistdecides that too many tears is over the top withrespect to one face, does he really have to redis-cover the same result from scratch with the others?

I liked Gabora’s idea of the sketches representingthe tip of the iceberg with respect to Picasso’s cre-ative process. But she has to draw the proper impli-cation from the metaphor: The tips still indicatewhere the iceberg is headed. If the iceberg is movingconsistently toward a specific destination—say, thefuture location of the Titanic—its tips will have togo in precisely the same direction and at the samespeed. And if the iceberg’s motion is more erratic,sometimes moving north, other times southwest,and so forth, then any prominences that peak abovethe ocean surface must follow in due course. IfPicasso’s sketches are the tips of the iceberg, thenthe currents of his thoughts were buffeted by some-what erratic winds.

I now turn to each of the sections in whichGabora presents her critique.

Was Darwin Motivated by a Paradox With NoEquivalent in Creative Thought?

Gabora (this issue) claims that the answer to theabove question is affirmative. There are two

problems with this affirmation. First, Darwin’smotivation for coming up with his evolutionarytheory has no relevance whatsoever for whetherhe can provide an eponym for a blind-variationand selective-retention (BVSR) process. Forexample, I am sure the commentator has no prob-lem referring to Mendelian genetics, despite thefact that the motivation behind his research wasto understand the process of hybridization andnot to identify the laws of inheritance (Monaghan& Corcos, 1990). The so-called Mendel’s Lawswere a side show that he personally deemed ofminor importance. That this side show becamethe main event long after his death does not meanthat we have to deny him credit for the discovery.

Second, and much more important, Gabora’sassertion is historically incorrect. Darwin was byno means as adverse to Lamarckian inheritanceis she claims. He was not only strongly influencedby Lamarck’s evolutionary theory, but evenadvanced his own version of the theory in 1868,less than a decade after the publication of Originof Species. That was his theory of pangenesis, atheory that proposed a mechanism for the inherit-ance of acquired characteristics. Hence, this wasnot the problem that he was trying to solve.Instead, Darwin’s explicit goal was to providea naturalistic account for the origin of speciesthat was not contingent on special creation. Thatis the reason why his theory provoked suchcontroversy—not because he tried to formulate anon-Lamarckian explanation. Moreover, his chiefdeparture from Lamarck was that he removedvolition as a causal agent that produced the vari-ation on which natural selection depends. Neithera divine being nor the organism itself can willfullyenact superior adaptive fitness. Placed in theproper historical context, I hope the reader, ifnot the commentator, will see why the applicationof the term Darwinian is appropriate to a BVSRmodel. To the extent that variations are blind isthe extent to which they lack volition. Creatorslack the capacity to will themselves toward themost fruitful direction. Darwin did not care oneiota about the inheritance of acquired characteris-tics, and neither do I.

Another feature of Gabora’s comments heredeserves reply, namely, that she places such greatemphasis on a kind of ratchet effect. Once an

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organism undergoes a change from one state toanother, the change becomes a fixed basis forfuture changes. For this reason, creativity doesproceed by the retention of acquired characteris-tics, contrary to her ahistorical conception ofDarwin’s theory. But this statement is only truewith respect to one specific aspect of the phenom-enon. To be sure, once the wheel is invented, thewheel will not be reinvented. And once Guernicais painted, it will not be repainted! Yet the phenom-enon we are talking about operates prior to thisfinality. When Picasso compiles a series of sketcheswith respect to a given figure, a later sketch inthe series does not necessarily replace or supplantan earlier sketch in the series. On the contrary,the more recent sketch is often merely added tothe earlier sketches, thereby increasing the numberof ideational variants. Clearly, because Picasso hasno fixed goal, even less a particular means tothat goal—other than the generation of blindvariations—he always has the liberty to decide thatan earlier sketch is superior to a later sketch. Judg-ing from Figure 4 in my article, he made thisdecision often, sometimes going back to one ofthe very earliest sketches in conceiving the finalproduct. The ratchet effect does not apply.

Even Biological Evolution Was Not Originally

Darwinian?

Gabora’s assertion that ‘‘even biological evol-ution was not originally Darwinian’’ is extremelydeceptive. This statement is based on her concep-tion of what constitutes a Darwinian process, andher conception is plainly founded in what hasbeen variously styled the modern evolutionary syn-thesis, the evolutionary synthesis, the modern syn-thesis, the new synthesis, the neo-Darwiniansynthesis, or simply neo-Darwinism. I like the lasttwo terms best because they emphasize that thismajor development in theoretical biology was notstrictly Darwinian, but rather neo-Darwinian.The difference between the two is comparable toNeo-Classicism versus Classicism, Neo-Freudianismversus Freudianism, Neo-Platonism versus Plato-nism, Neo-Confucianism versus Confucianism,Neo-Scholasticism versus Scholasticism, Neo-Surrealism versus Surrealism, etc. Neo-Darwinismintegrated particular aspects of Darwin’s theory

of natural selection with Mendelian genetics toyield the formal discipline of population genetics.The result is an extremely impressive mathematicalsynthesis that can be considered among the greatintellectual achievements of the early 20th century.Even so, the product was not Darwinism, butrather neo-Darwinism.

Gabora should recognize that an eponymic des-ignation such as Darwinian is a metaphor, not anidentity. To claim that creativity has Darwinianaspects is not equivalent to saying that it operatesexactly like the evolution of biological speciesaccording to Darwin. Rather, the claim signifiesthat a subset of his system of concepts has beencoopted to explicate some similar but not identicalphenomenon. For those who espouse a Darwinianview of creativity—from James (1880) to Campbell(1960) to myself—the concepts that have beenexpropriated are expressed as the BVSR mech-anism. Yet that usage does not preclude someonefrom appropriating some totally distinct featureof Darwin’s theory and assigning credit via aneponym. Indeed, that has already taken placemore than once, as witnessed in such terms asneural Darwinism and social Darwinism. Forexample, the latter doctrine commandeered theconcept of the struggle for existence and appliedit to human social groups such as cultures andraces. Likewise, the new evolutionary synthesiscould call itself neo-Darwinian, even though itrepudiated the Lamarckian components inDarwin’s thought. Hence, to condemn the BVSRtheory of creativity as non-Darwinian is to commita twofold error. First, Gabora introduces a doublestandard by permitting its usage for one phenom-enon but not for another, when both uses are notcompletely faithful to Darwin’s own formulation.Second, Gabora introduces an anachronistic cri-terion when she dismisses the BVSR theory ofcreativity because it does not comply with neo-Darwinism—a system that did not even exist inDarwin’s day.

Toward the end of this section, Gabora saysthat ‘‘nonmonotonic change is not a litmus testfor Darwinism’’ but I believe that she has missedthe main point of my argument. She seems to beoverlooking two critical distinctions. First, sheappears to confuse sequential versus simultaneousvariation. Unlike what occurs in biological

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evolution and genetic algorithms, where variantsin a given breeding season or generational cyclecan be emitted simultaneously, the creative indi-vidual almost invariably has to generate the var-iants sequentially. Even the great Picasso couldnot make one sketch with the left hand andanother with the right. Hence, what I am talkingabout is nonmonoticity in the shape of similaritycurve that describes the visual proximity of eachpictorial variant to the final conception. If thosevariants are truly blind, as the BVSR model holds,then the sequence of proximity assessments willperforce be nonmonotonic, for reasons alreadydiscussed in the target article.

Second, Gabora seems to confound variationwith change. The former concerns single variantsemitted by an individual, whereas the latter con-cerns the properties of the population of indivi-duals. These represent two distinct levels ofanalysis. In the former case, a BVSR process oper-ating in a sequential manner would necessarilyproduce nonmonotonic variants. Yet, in the lattercase, the population can change in a nonmono-tonic fashion. That is because population changeis the aggregate effect of BVSR operating at theindividual level. If selection progressively weedsout maladaptive genes and picks adaptive genesfor retention in the next reproductive cycle, thenthe fitness of the whole population, if largeenough, would approach the state of maximumadaptativeness according to a monotonic function.Each generation would be better adapted than theone before it. The same logic applies to geneticalgorithms.

Yet, if we examined the individual variants inthe process, and arranged them sequentially intime (e.g., in precise order of egg fertilization downto the nanosecond), it would be obvious that theresulting series would have to be nonomonotonicwith respect to fitness. For instance, suppose wecould precisely order all human babies in a givenpopulation according the exact moment of concep-tion and then determine the relative fitness of eachnewborn. The resulting fitness measure, whenarranged in sequence, would be nonmonotonic.Even if we carried out this investigation for severalgenerations, so that the average level of fitnessincreased, the baby-to-baby plot wouldremain nonmonotonic but with a positive overall

slope—just like the curve on the right side ofFigure 1 in my target article. Furthermore, ifwe were to confine attention to the progeny ofmonogamous breeding pairs (as in most birdsand a few mammals), we would find that thefitness evaluation of successive offspring woulddisplay the same pattern.

A Different Fitness Function for Each Variant?

In this section, I must return to the contrastbetween simultaneous and sequential variation.Although I am pleased that Gabora (this issue)quotes from my recent CRJ article on the subject(Simonton, 2005), I think she draws a false dichot-omy. She says that the variants are either simul-taneous or sequential, and if they are sequentialthen creativity cannot be Darwinian. In contrast,my position is that the variants are both sequentialand simultaneous. They are sequential in the sensethat the variations have to be generated in a parti-cular order. But they are simultaneous in the sensethat the production of variation nþ 1 does notautomatically mean that variation n has beenselected out of the running. The earlier variationmay still survive as a potential solution to theproblem. In the case of the sketches, it oftenappears as if Picasso is saying things like ‘‘Well,this might work, but let me try another possibility’’and a little later concludes ‘‘Hmm . . . looks likethis is not going anywhere; perhaps I should returnto that earlier sketch.’’ In a similar fashion, poetswill often fill notebooks with alternative linesand composers will do the same with thematicideas and their development. So the product ofthe sequential variation is frequently the accumu-lation of two or more simultaneous variants thatcan then undergo selection. Moreover, when theyare finally selected they may be judged by identicalor very similar criteria. I can imagine Picasso hold-ing up two distinct sketches for a particular figure,deliberating the pros and cons of each, and thensaying to himself ‘‘That one!’’

By the way, because I am unfamiliar with someof the literature Gabora cites, I do not completelycomprehend the scope of her assertion that all var-iants must be subject to the same fitness function.Even so, I am confident that the selection criteriathat determine fitness are constantly changing

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even in biological evolution. Interesting illustra-tions can be found in Sulloway’s (1996) discussionof within-family sibling competition. The secondborn is not born in the same environment as thefirst born, and the third born is born in anenvironment distinct from the two older sibs. Asa consequence, the selection pressures on eachchild are different. Although Sulloway’s focuswas on the selection of environmentally influencedphenotypic traits, the same observation applies tothe selection of the underlying genotypic traits.The genes that would be adaptive in a firstbornchild might be much less so in a later-born childwithin the same family. Despite this complication,I do not think that Gabora would argue that selec-tion theory is not applicable to the evolution ofHomo sapiens.

Perhaps this is the best place to insert a peculiaraside. Despite Gabora’s aversion to calling mytheory of creativity of Darwinian, other well-established Darwinists do not experience the samedifficulty. To offer but one illustration, MichaelRuse (2001) wrote a fine review of my Origins ofGenius for the Isis, the leading journal on the his-tory of science. His conclusion? ‘‘If a Darwinianapproach to human behavior and achievementis not total anathema to you, and you want toread a serious and sensible and insightful dis-cussion of human genius, you could do muchworse than start your inquiry with Origins ofGenius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity’’(pp. 588–589). Yet Ruse is among the leadingphilosophers writing on evolutionary theory,including Darwinism. If my theory was non-Darwinian, he sure would have stated such.

Darwinism Cannot Describe Honing?

This section is replete with misunderstandingsand irrelevancies. The following three stand out:

1. Gabora (this issue) says that a Darwinian viewof creativity requires that an exact record of avariant is stored in memory to build up the setof two or more variants on which selectioncan operate. This statement apparently contra-dicts what she was arguing in the previous sec-tion of her commentary, but that is not the

main point. Rather, her objection concerns thefact that memories are never retrieved exactly,but rather they are reconstructed. This is anidea that no one doubts; this is a finding thatis about 70 years older than her citation implies.Yet there are two problems with this objection.The first is the most obvious. Creators do notalways have to rely on memories. They havesupremely accurate records of their previousthoughts. Picasso, Leonardo, and other artistshad their sketches and sketchbooks, Darwin,Faraday, Beethoven, and many other creatorshad their notes and notebooks. Is Gabora will-ing to say that creativity is Darwinian in at leastthese occasions? The second problem is thatunder most circumstances the reconstructedmemory is a reasonable approximation to theoriginal idea. It may be distorted a number ofways, but under most conditions it will berecognizably similar to what was initiallystored. For instance, if I ask you to retrievean image of the home in which you grew up, Iwould be willing to bet the equity on my house(with my wife’s permission) that most of yourmemories would have clear correspondence tothe actual home in which you spent your child-hood and adolescence. Is Gabora saying thatany departure whatsoever from the originalidea automatically invalidates the Darwiniannature of creativity? If not, how much of a dis-crepancy is necessary to discredit a Darwinianinterpretation? And does it really matter unlessyou are filtering everything through a neo-Darwinian framework?

2. Gabora’s statement that ‘‘one innovates not byrandomly choosing among predefined alterna-tives but by thinking through how somethingcould work’’ betrays a profound misapprehen-sion of BVSR theory—so deep that I suspectthat some (random) verbal slip may haveintruded in her commentary. No Darwiniantheory of any kind—not Darwin’s originaltheory, not social Darwinism, not neuralDarwinism, not even neo-Darwinism—wouldever assert that Darwinism requires randomselection! Certainly this is not a premise of theDarwinian theory of creativity. The lattertheory does not even require that the variationsbe random. Although all random variations are

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blind, most blind variations are not random (seemy earlier replies to Weisberg and Hass, thisissue).

3. Gabora proclaims that even if BVSR mightaccount for recombinations of already presentideas, it could not possibly account for innova-tive creations of the highest order. This, too,represents a misconception of the theory.Although ideational variants are always combi-natorial products of prior ideas—as Weisbergand Haas (this issue) document with respect toPicasso—that does mandate that the productslack genuine conceptual novelty (see Simonton,2004). One reason is that great breakthroughsare often predicated on the integration of twoor more conceptual spaces that had hithertobeen kept separate. Newton combined Galileanterrestrial mechanics with Kepler’s astronomi-cal laws to produce his revolutionary celestialmechanics. Picasso added African art to his pre-vious repertoire of visual images and ended upwith his landmark Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.In addition, the combinatorial process doesnot have to operate exclusively with lower-orderconcepts. As noted in my discussion of anal-ogies, the variants can incorporate moreabstract relations that exist at a higher level inthe conceptual hierarchy (cf. the contrastbetween genetic engineering and genetic pro-gramming). Such higher-order structures oftenhave a major role to play in pathbreaking crea-tivity. Darwin’s theory depended greatly ondrawing direct comparisons with artificial selec-tion, the subject of the very first chapter ofOrigin. In fact, the actual name natural selectionwas patterned after the other term. To sum up,although I am pleased that Gabora is willing toacknowledge the place of BVSR processesin more mundane forms of creativity, I wouldlike her to reconsider her constraints on itsapplicability.

One last observation: I imagine that other read-ers, besides myself, would have spotted an oddityin this section. Although titled ‘‘Darwinism Can-not Describe Honing,’’ the contents of the sectionappear to deal with other issues. The word honingor hone is not even found in the paragraph, noranywhere else in the entire comment! Unhappily,

that means that I have to write a reply to a headingrather than to one or more paragraphs. But hap-pily, I have discussed this question with her inthe past, and so I have some idea what she wouldhave said. Let me begin by affirming that the hon-ing of ideas does have a part to play in problemsolving. On the one hand, honing does adequatelydescribe what occurs in relatively routine problemsthat can be solved via well-established algorithms.Through a series of iterations that yield ever closerapproximations, the individual converges on a sol-ution. On the other hand, honing often proves use-ful in the later stages of creativity after the solutionitself has been discovered. We experience this pro-cess all of the time in writing up our results forpublication. We start with a rough draft and then,through a series of revisions, arrive at a manu-script that we are willing to submit for editorialconsideration. Gabora is right: Darwinian theorycannot explain either of these two honing pro-cesses. Even so, it doesn’t have to. Neither of theseactivities would be considered highly creative bymost researchers in the field.

Methodological Critique?

Gabora’s (this issue) final comment concernsthe methodology, rather than the theory. As shepoints out, she had earlier volunteered to haveher students perform the task that was executedby my five raters. She was not able to get the col-lective ratings to me in time, but I did inform herof a brief analysis that could provide some feed-back to her students. Their ratings had only asmall positive correlation with those of the otherfive raters (r ¼ .36) and a smaller negative corre-lation with the actual sketch order (r ¼�.19).From this ill-fated experience, she has suggestedthat the task was impossibly difficult. I believe thatthis inference is unjustified.

First, the five raters did agree with each other,even if they did not agree with her students. Any-one familiar with psychometric methods will rea-lize that to obtain a coefficient alpha of .85 for a5-item composite is no mean accomplishment.

Second, despite some variation across raters,they all obtained positive correlations with the truesketch order. Only the commentator’s studentsobtained a negative association.

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Third, all of the five judges were given muchmore time to execute the task—as much time asthey needed. In this regard I think it telling thatWeisberg, one of the five raters, did not raise thiscriticism in the commentary he coauthored withHass (Weisberg & Hass, this issue). After all, hewas one of the five raters and had first-handexperience with the task.

Fourth, Gabora exaggerates the difficulty of theprocedure. According to instructions, the judgesbegan by sorting the sketches according to the fig-ures in the final painting to which they applied.Only afterwards did they do the similarity assess-ments, and then only within each figural category.As specified in the target article, there were 11 bullsketches, 9 of the mother with her dead child, 11 ofthe warrior, 23 of the horse, 6 of the woman hold-ing the lamp, 11 of the head of the weepingwoman, plus fewer than 3 sketches for the remain-ing figures. Sorting the sketches within each ofthese categories does not seem too arduous.Gabora herself says that she could handle theproblem it if involved 10–15 sketches, and onlythe horse exceeded this limitation. My suspicionis that her students, like many undergraduatesplaced in this situation, either failed to understandthe instructions or else lacked sufficient motivationto carry out the task.

Beghetto and Plucker

I have saved the commentary of Beghetto andPlucker (this issue) for last because its contentsare quite different from the previous three. Besidesraising very different issues, the issues they raise donot require me to devote a lot of effort in writing areply. Like Mumford and Antes (this issue), theyalso devote some space to offering their take onWeisberg and Hass’s (this issue) critique. Beghettoand Plucker suggest that some of the contentiousissues might be constructively addressed byextending the discussion from Big C to little c crea-tivity. Even though I tend to believe that theDarwinian theory of creativity is most applicableto Big C creativity, that assertion does not meanthat it does not operate at all in little c creativity.It may even apply to what Beghetto and Pluckerstyle ‘‘mini-c creativity.’’ I would certainly

welcome any future efforts to establish connec-tions between the three levels. I do believe thatthe difference among these levels is quantitative,rather than qualitative. Therefore, some of thecognitive, personality, developmental, and socialfactors that distinguish degrees of Big C creativityshould also distinguish Big C from little c, and lit-tle c from mini-c creativity (see Simonton, 1999). Itis gratifying to have my final comment end on thispositive note.

Conclusion

In general, the critical comments tended to fallinto two major categories. In one category arethose that argue that creativity does not fit a BVSRmodel, even in the special case of the process thatled to Picasso’s Guernica. This is the main thrustof Weisberg and Hass (this issue), as well asMumford and Antes (this issue). In the other cate-gory is Gabora’s (this issue) argument that thetheoretical account is not only wrong, but also thatit cannot be identified as Darwinian if it were right.I would like to think that my rejoinder has madesome progress toward answering some of the keyobjections in either category. At the very minimum,I feel that the Darwinian theory of creativity hasundergone a valuable elaboration as a result of thisexchange. As I said much earlier in this article, myideas have evolved considerably since my first pub-lication on this topic some three decades ago. Nowthose ideas have evolved even more. And becauseof that evolution, I have become all the more con-fident that the theory will not go extinct.

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Documents

REJOINDER: Picasso's Guernica Creativity as a Darwinian Process: Definitions, Clarifications, Misconceptions, and Applications