The arts as engines of social tinkering: Variation generation, safe experimentation, and cognitive training.

Chater & Christiansen's social tinkering thesis compellingly explains how cultural complexity emerges from local innovations. However, it underspecifies the role of the arts, treating them as outputs rather than inputs to tinkering. We argue the arts serve three crucial, underappreciated functions: generating variation for recombination, providing consequence-free experimentation spaces, and building the cognitive and social skills that enable sophisticated tinkering.