The human imagination

The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional. By Agustín Fuentes. Dutton; 340 pages; $28.

OF THE millions of animal species on Earth, only one has built a spaceship and flown to the Moon. In “The Creative Spark”, Agustín Fuentes, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, argues that it is the power of imagination, more than anything, that has made humans unique among the planet’s beasts.

That is a controversial case to make. Man’s distinctiveness has been attributed to an aptitude for violence, exceptional intelligence or a preternatural ability to co-operate. Mr Fuentes contends that this fails to take into account the full range of evidence available to researchers. Instead, he turns to niche construction, a relatively recent idea in evolutionary science that emerged in the 1980s, but one which, he says, can offer the basis of a more complete account of humanity’s ingenuity. The ecological niche that an organism occupies is the sum total of all the interactions that it has with its environment. Altering that environment, as beavers do when they build dams, for example, is niche construction. Humans, Mr Fuentes says, are “niche constructors extraordinaire”.

The author ranges across the creative history of the human race to look at how the species has reshaped its surroundings to edge ahead of its competitors. He begins with ancient toolmaking: the slippery art of smashing particular kinds of rock together to make sharp flakes of stone. That complex process gave humans access to new sources of food. But it must also have required extensive co-operation, so that those noisily crafting the tools would not be eaten by predators.

For those who see “man, the hunter” and “woman, the nurturer” when they imagine life in the distant past, Mr Fuentes points out that there is no evidence from archaeology to support the idea that roles were assigned according to gender or age. He also disputes a view, recently popularised in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker, that mankind has a natural lust for violence which has only recently been tamed. Proponents of that notion have largely ignored evidence more than 14,000 years old, according to Mr Fuentes. He concludes that, on the contrary, the incidence of murder and warfare has increased over the past 5,000 years.

Mr Fuentes’s discussion of the ancient origins of science is, perhaps, the weakest part of his book. He asserts that early humans must have had a primitive understanding of the laws of physics to throw a spear accurately. Yet no one ascribes scientific thinking to archerfish because they are able shoot down insects by spitting jets of water at them. Other examples of early scientific thinking could better be described as forms of engineering, a process of trial and error that has altogether more ancient roots. The book’s final chapter, on what humans today can learn from the species’ creative past, is also a little glib. Overall, its central thesis—that the power of the imagination alone is responsible for human success—is not entirely convincing.

That said, “The Creative Spark” is strong on man’s imaginative accomplishments and offers an important corrective to the skewed debate on human nature. A species that, uniquely, ponders its own exceptionality will surely be fascinated by it.