  Mnay models situated in the current research landscape of modelling and
simulating social processes have roots in physics. This is visible in the name
of specialties as Econophysics or Sociophysics. This chapter describes the
history of knowledge transfer from physics, in particular physics of
self-organization and evolution, to the social sciences. We discuss why
physicists felt called to describe social processes. Across models and
simulations the question how to explain the emergence of something new is the
most intriguing one. We present one model approach to this problem and
introduce a game -- Evolino -- inviting a larger audience to get acquainted
with abstract evolution-theory approaches to describe the quest for new ideas.
