  In a society, a proportion of the individuals can benefit from creativity
without being creative themselves by copying the creators. This paper uses an
agent-based model of cultural evolution to investigate how society is affected
by different levels of individual creativity. We performed a time series
analysis of the mean fitness of ideas across the artificial society varying
both the percentage of creators, C, and how creative they are, p using two
discounting methods. Both analyses revealed a valley in the adaptive landscape,
indicating a tradeoff between C and p. The results suggest that excess
creativity at the individual level can be detrimental at the level of the
society because creators invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating
proven ideas.
