Most mammals start out cute, playful, and innovative, and
gradually become grim, pragmatic, and habit-ridden. Ashley
Montagu and many others have observed that humans retain
some aspects of juvenile playfulness longer into adulthood.
This has been considered one of the prime symptoms of
human "neoteny," the slowing-down of behavioral maturation
relative to physical maturation. The traditional explanation
for human neoteny is that slower cognitive development might
permit a longer period of useful learning. Certainly there may
have been good reasons for specific kinds of social learning to
persist longer into adulthood over hominid evolution. But I
see no reason why this would generalize into the sort of
playfulness that we see in adult humans but not in adult
chimpanzees.
Playfulness has large time and energy costs. Indeed, biologists
struggled for a long time to identify what possible benefits could
offset the costs of play behavior, even for young animals. A
consensus has emerged that most animal play is practice. Playfighting,
play-chasing, and play-fleeing are ways of practicing
some of the most important skills that adult animals need for
competing, eating, and avoiding being eaten. But once these basic
skills are mastered, what possible selection pressure could favor
the retention of playfulness into adulthood?
One clue is that adult human playfulness is not uniform across
all situations. When human hunter-gatherers are foraging, they do
not walk playfully like John Cleese in the Monty Python "Ministry
of Silly Walks" sketch. They walk along with the silent, steady
efficiency of any other adult mammal making its living. But when
they are socializing in a group—especially a mixed-sex group—
they may very well hop, skip, jump, and do the Chicken Walk.
Playful, creative behaviors could function as indicators of youthfulness. Their persistence into human adulthood may be not
a side-effect of neoteny, but a result of direct sexual selection for
youth indicators. We have already seen how large human breasts
may have evolved as youth indicators. The same reasoning would
work here for playfulness and creativity: if playfulness usually
decreases from juveniles to older adulthood for all mammals, then
playfulness may be a reliable cue of youthfulness, health, and
fertility.
Playfulness is also a general fitness indicator. The energy and
time costs of play were sufficient to make biologists wonder
why play could ever have evolved even in young animals. These
costs do not go away for adults—if anything, they increase.
Juveniles have to compete only for survival, but sexually
mature adults also have to compete sexually and take care of
offspring. The costs of playfulness for adults with so many
demands on their time and energy may be higher than the
costs for juveniles. And as adults grow older, the relative energy
costs of playfulness must keep increasing. Middle-aged and
older adults often revert to the playfulness of youth if they fall
in love again with someone new, though their playfulness does
not usually show the same incandescent physical energy as that
of young adults. Thus, the costs of playfulness generally
increase as age increases, and this makes playfulness a
potentially reliable indicator of youth, fertility, energy, and
fitness.
Still, creativity is a mental capacity, whereas play is a physical
manifestation of creativity. It is easy to see how running around
and acting playful for several hours could be favored by sexual
selection as a fitness indicator. It is less clear how the quieter forms
of creativity could be favored. They are not necessarily manifest
in whole-body movements. They may be displayed mostly in
verbal courtship, which has low energy costs. Creativity may also
be displayed in art or music, which only have moderate
performance costs.
However, there is good evidence that even less physical forms of
creativity can work as energy indicators. Psychologist Dean
Keith Simonton found a strong relationship between creative achievement and productive energy. Among competent professionals
in any field, there appears to be a fairly constant
probability of success in any given endeavor. Simonton's data
show that excellent composers do not produce a higher proportion
of excellent music than good composers—they simply
produce a higher total number of works. People who achieve
extreme success in any creative field are almost always extremely
prolific. Hans Eysenck became a famous psychologist not because
all of his papers were excellent, but because he wrote over a
hundred books and a thousand papers, and some of them
happened to be excellent. Those who write only ten papers are
much less likely to strike gold with any of them. Likewise with
Picasso: if you paint 14,000 paintings in your lifetime, some of
them are likely to be pretty good, even if most are mediocre.
Simonton's results are surprising. The constant probability-ofsuccess
idea sounds very counterintuitive, and of course there are
exceptions to this generalization. Yet Simonton's data on creative
achievement are the most comprehensive ever collected, and in
every domain that he studied, creative achievement was a good
indicator of the energy, time, and motivation invested in creative
activity.
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