This article was taken from the March 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Once, while travelling in the Australian outback, I met an aboriginal man called Sammy who showed me how his tribe made a hafted knife by using a natural sap or pitch to glue sharp pieces of stone to a wooden handle. I noticed that the way he attached these blades to the handle didn't seem likely to produce a strong bond, so, through an interpreter, I asked him why he didn't do it differently. He stared at me for a moment and then replied that his tribe had always done it his way.
I don't suggest that I had a better alternative, or that I had spotted a flaw in a piece of cultural technology that Sammy's tribe might have used for millennia. There was probably a good reason why his tribe produced the tool as they did. My point is that Sammy didn't seem to know what that reason was (or he simply couldn't be bothered to tell this interloper a tribal secret).
There is no reason to think that Sammy is unusual or different.
You are surrounded by objects such as smartphones and microwaves that you don't know how to make, much less understand how they work. It is even more stark than this. In his 1958 essay "I, Pencil", Leonard Read wrote: "Not a single person on the face of this Earth knows how to make me." And it is true: to make a pencil you'll need to know about mining, refining and shaping graphite, and the same for the wood, rubber and metal; and even then you haven't made the pencil.
The sobering truth is that far from being highly creative and innovative, most of us are just glorified "karaoke singers" in most aspects of our lives, using things others have made. So how then has our species acquired its technological innovations, progressing from simple hand axes to the iPads and smartphones of today?
It is part of our cultural mythology that if you think hard enough about something, you will figure it out - the light bulb popping on in your mind. But history shows that technological change is not characterised by great inventive leaps - it is almost always incremental and builds on a previous technology.
Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb, he merely produced a better filament, and even then he only discovered that filament after trying thousands. James Watt didn't invent the steam engine - he improved Newcomen's. Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly line and Steve Jobs didn't invent the mouse and its "point-and-click"
OS: he copied (some say "stole") them from the Xerox Corporation.
This is the dark secret of our creativity - we copy ideas, tinker or play with them, and sometimes combine them with other ideas to make new things. Sammy's hafted knife is a wooden club and a blade. But this means that our creativity does not require any real individual creativity at all. Our ideas could even be no better than random and still: if just one person accidentally stumbles on to a good one (as Edison did), others can copy it.
Now, it might seem remarkable but this simple mechanism of copying and incremental progress is the same one that evolution by natural selection has blindly used for billions of years to create organisms like you and me.
Biological organisms copy their genes when they reproduce, sometimes these genes mutate and occasionally new combinations combine to make a new species. Genetic mutation is random, but by accident some mutated genes improve on the old and natural selection ensures they survive and spread.
We can blame evolution for making us little more than the glorified karaoke singers we are. Or as Voltaire put it: "originality is nothing but judicious imitation".
Mark Pagel is a fellow of the Royal Society, professor of evolutionary biology at Reading University and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico. He is the author of Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (Norton/Penguin)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
