Physics of Life Reviews 7 (2010) 188189

www.elsevier.com/locate/plrev

Comment

On the blind-mindedness of creative thought

Comment on Creative thought as blind-variation and
selective-retention: Combinatorial models of exceptional creativity
by Dean Keith Simonton
Subrata Dasgupta
Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA 70504-3772, USA
Received 4 May 2010; accepted 4 May 2010
Available online 7 May 2010
Communicated by L. Perlovsky

Keywords: Creativity; Blind-variation; Darwinism

In an earlier work, basing his arguments on Campbells blind-variation and selective-retention theory (BVSR) [1],
Simonton asserted that Darwinism offers the most powerful and distinctive perspective on creativity [2, p. 248],
a proposition which has since been opposed [3,4]. In this current paper Simonton no longer claims that BVSR is
Darwinian (p. 2). Instead he has offered a new proposition: Nothing about creativity can be comprehended except in
the light of BVSR (p. 19).
At the heart of his argument is his definition of blindness (p. 4). This definition assumes, implicitly, that creative
processes (I) involves the generation of at least two complete ideas as variations on which selection can work; and
(II) the variations are distinct from one another with their distinct independent probabilities of occurrence and surviv-
ability. These assumptions may well be true for the kind of examples Simonton cites, e.g., when a scientist proposes
two distinct explanatory hypotheses, and which one is correct can only be ascertained by specific experiments.
But there are many instances from the actual history of creative thought where these assumptions do not hold.
Here I offer merely one such instance: the process by which Robert Stephenson arrived at his design of the Britannia
Bridge in the 1840s [5,6]. Here, neither of the assumptions (I) and (II) holds. At first Stephenson generated two pos-
sible designs for the bridge (the suspension bridge and arch bridge forms) and then rejected both; he then returned
to one of these original ideas (the suspension bridge form) and the rest of his long ideational process involved a suc-
cession of modifications and refinements to this one form such that the final idea (a tubular, wrought-iron form) had
no resemblance whatsoever to the original suspension bridge form. To suggest that Stephensons ideational process
entailed the generation of blind variations (according to Simontons definition of blindness) on which selective reten-
tion occurred is patently absurd. This is just one example that falsifies Simontons claim of the universality of BVSR.

DOI of original article: 10.1016/j.plrev.2010.02.002.

E-mail address: subrata@louisiana.edu.

1571-0645/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.plrev.2010.05.002
 S. Dasgupta / Physics of Life Reviews 7 (2010) 188189 189

Another falsifying example is the process by which Herbert Simon arrived at his cognitive theory of human decision
making [7].

References

[1] Campbell DT. Blind variation and selective retention in creative thought as in other knowledge processes. Psychological Review 1960;34:1141
52.
[2] Simonton DK. Origins of genius. New York: Oxford University Press; 1999.
[3] Dasgupta S. Is creativity a Darwinian process? Creativity Research Journal 2004;16:40313.
[4] Weisberg RW. On structure in the creative process: A quantitative case-study of the creation of Picassos Guernica. Empirical Studies of the
Arts 2004;22:2354.
[5] Dasgupta S. Testing the hypothesis law of design: The case of the Britannia Bridge. Research in Engineering Design 1994;6:3857.
[6] Dasgupta S. Technology and creativity. New York: Oxford University Press; 1996. p. 7886, 1105.
[7] Dasgupta S. Innovation in the social sciences: Herbert A. Simon, the birth of a research tradition. In: Shavinina LV, editor. The international
handbook on innovation. Oxford: Elsevier Science; 2003. p. 45870.