Is creativity a Darwinian process?

Abstract: In 1960, the psychologist Donald Campbell advanced a Darwinian model of how new knowledge comes into being. This would later come to be known as “evolutionary epistemology”;. For some psychologists and historians of science interested in creativity in science and technology, the Darwinian perspective was irresistible. Thus, in 1988, the psychologist Dean Keith Simonton proposed a Darwinian model of the psychology of scientific discovery by refining Campbell's model. Recently, in 1999, Simonton has devoted an entire book to “Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity.”; In this article, I challenge the Darwinian perspective by examining three episodes taken from the histories of natural science, technology and art, respectively.

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