A Multi-Disciplinary Survey of Biocomputing: 2. Systems and Evolutionary Levels, and Technological Applications∗

The second part of this survey examines biocomputing in intact multicellular organisms. The parallelism between creative problem solving and evolution is emphasized: both processes invoke heuristic searching and feature modularity prominently. Simonton’s chance-configuration theory of creative problem solving is recast in terms of pattern recognition and analyzed in terms of parallel and sequential processing. An attempt is made to demystify the creative process that is commonly thought to be the monopoly of geniuses. It is shown that the procedures utilized in high creativity and in everyday ingenuity are fundamentally the same, but geniuses push the creative process to the extreme. A re-interpretation of Freud’s concept of the unconscious in terms of selective attention is invoked to dispel the mystery surrounding the introspective account of Henri Poincaré on mathematical