by Marc Egeth In the human factors business, we are always up against leading-edge technology. This naturally makes us think about where technology comes from. Knowing where technology comes from might provide insights into how to improve it in the future. One answer, that might be obvious, is that people are smart and creative, and invent lots of things, and that is where technology comes from. However, some so-called cultural transmission theorists provide a different sort of explanation, one that is so counterintuitive, yet so explanatory, as to be worth dwelling on, even if it is not the final answer. In a nutshell, their suggestion is that technology emerges through an evolutionary process, and that the resulting designs, just like in biological evolution, are brilliantly genius, but they need no brilliantly genius intelligence to create them. Below, I will provide some brief background on how biological evolution works to produce designs without creativity, with an eye to