Towards a Comparison of Evolutionary Creativity in Biological and Cultural Evolution

Bedau and Packard have defined evolutionary activity statistics that illuminate the adaptive evolutionary creativity of biological evolution. The statistics enable us to visualize adaptive evolutionary dynamics and to measure the intensity and extent of adaptive evolution, and can be used to define qualitatively different kinds of evolving systems. Here we describe how to apply evolutionary activity statistics to systems undergoing cultural rather than biological evolution, and we report preliminary results of implementing this method in technological evolution as reflected in patent record data. Measuring evolutionary activity in patent records provides a clear picture of the major adaptive phenomena at work in the evolution of technology. It also enables the quantitative and empirical comparison of the adaptive evolutionary dynamics of biological and cultural evolution. Evolution of life and culture A key question about evolving systems is to explain the source of their adaptive creativity. This question has broad applicability, concerning both artificial and natural evolving systems, and it applies to systems exhibiting either biological or cultural evolution. In a series of papers Bedau and Packard have shown how evolutionary activity statistics can be used to visualize and measure the creation of adaptations in many evolutionary systems (Bedau & Packard 1992; Bedau et al. 1997; Bedau, Snyder, & Packard 1998; Bedau & Brown 1999; Rechtsteiner & Bedau 1999) . These statistics are quite general and apply to data generated by both artificial and natural systems, and they apply at different levels of analysis. The study of evolutionary activity in natural and artificial biological evolution has yielded an intriguing picture of qualitatively different kinds of evolving systems (Bedau, Snyder, & Packard 1998). The biosphere as reflected in the fossil record shows an especially interesting and explosive kind of evolutionary creativity (Bedau et al. 1997; Bedau, Snyder, & Packard 1998), and it has been conjectured that the same kind of explosive adaptive creativity would be seen in certain kinds of cultural evolution (Bedau, Snyder, & Packard 1998). This paper takes the first step toward assessing that conjecture. We show how to apply evolutionary activity statistics to cultural evolution as reflected in patent records. This is a pilot project applied to patent data covering the past five and a half years. Our aim is to show how to create an empirical picture of the adaptive evolutionary dynamics in the evolution of patented inventions. Such pictures will enable us to compare the dynamics of patented technology with those exhibited in biological evolution. It is especially interesting whether this kind of cultural evolution is qualitatively like that exhibited in the fossil record. The ultimate aims of this work is to illuminate the relationship between life and culture. One relationship is trivial: cultural phenomena involve the behavior or psychology of living creatures, especially humans. A much more interesting and controversial question is whether living and cultural phenomena and the mechanisms shaping them are in some way essentially the same. This is closely connected to question thirteen in the list of grand challenges in artificial life produced at Artificial Life VII (Bedau et al. 2000), and it is our focus here. We approach this issue by showing how to compare the statistical signature of biological and cultural evolution in empirical evolutionary activity data. There is plenty of previous work on cultural evolution and on patents, but none quite like ours. For many years cultural change has been treated as a process of the diffusion of ideas (Rogers 1995), and the scientometrics community has been investigating scientific and technological change by analysis of patent records and the like for decades (Pavitt 1985; Garfield & Welljams-Dorof 1992; Narin 1994; Albert 1998). But these approaches understand “evolution” in the sense of physics rather than biology, that is, simply as any change in time rather than just change resulting from differential imperfect replication and selection. Sociobiology (Wilson 1978; Lumsden & Wilson 1981) The work reported in this paper is related to at least two further grand challenges in artificial life: question six about the nature of open-ended evolution and question eleven about the emergence of intelligence and mind in artificial