When I look at the history of human culture I really see a lot of remixing and "trends" and the leaps are rather small.
What sticks out is really the lack of people doing something totally new. Look back on history and it seems like humans can't do anything except as in response to some input that we re-mix. (Although it is across fields -- a change in economic conditions or scientific outlook may affect music and painting; a small improvement in factory production methods may ripple down to experiments validating general relativity, etc)
Why didn't Mozart create a piece of jazz or rock to mix things up? Why are there no medieval cubistic painters? Why didn't someone understand $scientific_topic before?
Most such questions can be answered by some kind of "the social environment and culture at that time didn't prepare people to do it". I.e., humans couldn't remix it yet from what was already there.
Yes there are leaps but they seem to always be within some small "box" that prior knowledge creates for us. We can jump one inch at the time but no further..
What sticks out is really the lack of people doing something totally new. Look back on history and it seems like humans can't do anything except as in response to some input that we re-mix. (Although it is across fields -- a change in economic conditions or scientific outlook may affect music and painting; a small improvement in factory production methods may ripple down to experiments validating general relativity, etc)
Why didn't Mozart create a piece of jazz or rock to mix things up? Why are there no medieval cubistic painters? Why didn't someone understand $scientific_topic before?
Most such questions can be answered by some kind of "the social environment and culture at that time didn't prepare people to do it". I.e., humans couldn't remix it yet from what was already there.
Yes there are leaps but they seem to always be within some small "box" that prior knowledge creates for us. We can jump one inch at the time but no further..