Liane Gabora is a professor ofpsychology at theUniversity of British Columbia - Okanagan.[1] She is known for her theory of the "Origin of the modern mind through conceptual closure," which built on her earlier work on "Autocatalytic closure in a cognitive system: A tentative scenario for the origin of culture."
Gabora has contributed to the study ofcultural evolution andevolution of societies, focusing on the role of personal creativity, as opposed tomemetic imitation or instruction, in differentiating modern human from priorhominid or modernape culture. In particular, she seems to followfeminist economists andgreen economists in making a distinction between creative "enterprise", invention, art or "individual capital" and imitative "meme", rule, social category or "instructional capital".
Gabora's views contrasts with that ofmemetics and of the strongestsocial capital theorists (e.g.Karl Marx orPaul Adler) in that she seems to see social signals or labels as markers of trust invested in individual and instructional complexes, rather than as first class actors in themselves.
Some of her more recent work is controversial in thephilosophy of science and goes against theparticle physics foundation ontology.
"Honing Theory: A Complex Systems Framework for Creativity" is her publication, which suggests that culture evolves through social interaction and exchange between minds that self-organise and modify based on their environment.[2] Creativity arises due to the possibility of uncertainty and disorder, resulting in arousal and a process of novelty and originality until the arousal dissipates. This in turn feeds the cultural norm which in turn feeds further creativity resulting in part the evolution of culture.
