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In the March issue of Wired, SFI External Professor Mark Pagel writes that human invention isn't creativity so much as it is improving on and combining ideas that came earlier -- and that is essentially the same process as evolution.

"History shows that technological change is not characterised by great inventive leaps - it is almost always incremental and builds on a previous technology," the writes. "This is the dark secret of our creativity - we copy ideas, tinker or play with them, and sometimes combine them with other ideas to make new things."

"Now, it might seem remarkable but this simple mechanism of copying and incremental progress is the same one that evolution by natural selection has blindly used for billions of years to create organisms like you and me."

Read Pagel's article in Wired (March 2014)