Our creativity as a species stems in part from our ability to use knowledge passed from older generations and to receive guidance from leaders in how to use it in new ways. The shared mission of neurologists within their own groups, departments, and institutions, and within the specialty, is no exception. But our ability to work together and accept the direction of leaders is relatively new in Homo sapiens' roughly 200,000-year-old existence. In that time, it took 195,000 years to invent a wheel, 199,500 years to create a printing press, and 199,900 years to develop an automobile. Given that time frame, how can we account for this unprecedented leap in creativity if there was not enough time for natural selection's incremental physiological, structural, and genetic “improvements?”
Alfred Russell Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, and both proposed a theory of natural selection as the basis for the evolution of species. However, Wallace felt that the human mind was an exception to this theory. He posited a more spiritual explanation. Many regarded this scientific “softness” with derision, but his observation that natural selection was a poor explanation for man's unprecedented creative leap may have been more scientifically astute than Darwin's failure to question it. Many anthropologists currently agree with Wallace that incremental improvements alone fail to explain this behavioral leap. They instead explain it by human cultural evolution, which, in a nutshell, is the sharing of information within and across generations. The emergence of language probably made this sharing possible.
Homo sapiens' success in developing a cumulative culture is based on cooperation with both kin and nonkin, and exceptional reliance on cultural transmission within and across generations. This is rare or absent in other apes whose cooperative behaviors are much more closely kin focused. Kinship is an important organizing principle in primate social groups. In macaques, for example, as the genetic relatedness of members decreases within a group, the social instability of the group increases, resulting in more fighting and wounding (PLoS One 2011;6:e16365).
In contrast, primitive human hunter gatherer societies are 25% genetically unrelated, 50% distantly related, and only 25% closely related. This nonrelatedness fosters intergroup interactions that may lead to the spread of cooperative institutions. When people reside together they have frequent opportunities to observe innovations and imitate successful traits. The change in ancestral human residential structure, compared with our evolutionary ancestors, may have therefore led to greater exposure to more ideas of value and may explain why humans and no other animals developed the costly social learning mechanisms that have resulted in cultural evolution (Science 2011;331:1286-9). This increasingly complex social behavior is correlated with brain size, especially in the frontal neocortex.
The wheel and the space shuttle are both products of creativity, but among their many obvious differences is one we can call the “creative unit.” The wheel's creative unit could have been a single person with all the tools needed to generate the first prototype, whereas the space shuttle clearly required many teams of people working together. Coordinating a team requires leadership. Effective leaders maintain high mutual cooperation among their group's members by ensuring that the penalty for noncooperation is fair and outweighed by any possible reward for noncooperation. Leaders must enforce social norms, rules, or laws. If mutual cooperation with a social norm is perceived by the membership to drop, then individual defection rates will rise and the previously defined social norm will break down (Trends Cogn. Sci. 2004;8:185-90). Saying something is so will work only as long as it usually is so, and it is the leader's role to maintain that consistency. One caveat is that leaders should also be perceived as tolerant. Few people have perfect track records of cooperation, and occasional minor missteps must be accommodated. In a study that looked at the reaction of leadership to such noncooperative behavior, it was shown that cooperative behavior in a social grouping is enhanced by perceived mercy of those in charge (Nature 2003;422:137-40). Consistency, fairness, and temperance in holding members accountable all matter in a leader's ability to foster cooperation.
Effective leaders create a culture of identity and mission, and foster belief in the group's competitive superiority so that the group believes it can win. The culture must distinguish the group's creative unit from others (“Myth and Meaning” [New York: Schocken Books, 1979, p. 20]). Within such a unit, teamwork will flourish and space shuttles will fly. Cooperation is enhanced by perceived similarity among a group's members. While this can apply to physical appearances, similarity is more defined in a business setting, research lab, or neurology department by a sense of shared mission. Just as the role of every member of NASA, from astronomer to janitor, is to put us into space, the mission of a health care organization, from the doctors to the secretaries, is to heal patients.