الموضوع: هل تولد الحياة من رحم الموت؟؟؟ دراسة بحثية
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قديم 09-11-2013, 09:09 AM
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The productivity question is also an occasion for Simonton to introduce an equation apparently discovered by the historian of science, Derek de Solla Price. Imagine a group of ten workers who are doing a rote job, say, stuffing envelopes. In such a case, we’d expect that each individual worker would do 10% of the work, that five would do 50%, and so forth. But imagine the job is creative: ten publishing physicists in a physics department, or ten composers in a music department. Price’s Law states that in these creative cases, 50% of the total worthwhile (i.e., publishable) output will be produced by a minority of producers equal to the square root of the total number of people involved. In a ten-person physics department, the teaching loads and administrative chores might be equalized, but given natural variations in productiveness, about three (roughly the square root of ten) people would normally be producing half of the publications, at least publications of a quality sufficient to appear in a scientific journal (in the arts the quality criterion will presumably be the test of time). A striking implication of Price’s Law is that the larger the total number of producers in a field, the smaller the 50%-producers group becomes as a percentage of the whole. If it is a group of a hundred poets or chemists, half of the worthwhile creative work will be produced by ten (10% of the whole); if there are 10,000 in the pool then half the work will be produced by a group of mere 100 (1% of the whole). This is presumably because the larger the group the greater the likelihood of it possessing a few highly productive talents, and it explains, why, for example, the nineteenth-century music we listen to is dominated by a tiny minority of familiar composers; try as we might to resuscitate lesser lights (Cherubini, Clara Schumann, John Field), there remains an overwhelming dominance of listener preference in a relatively small handful of composers.
The other characteristic of genius most worth noting is its obvious connection with various forms and degrees of insanity. Simonton gives long lists of scientific and artistic geniuses who suffer from schizophrenic and other cognitive disorders, who were depressive or bipolar, or who exhibited severe neuroses. The names, from Tycho Brahe to Newton to Van Gogh and Rachmaninoff, are familiar and so are the stories. The differential rates of mental disturbance contain unsurprising news that scientists are generally a whole lot more stable than artists. In one historical study, he reports, 28% of notable scientists exhibited mental disturbance, whereas the rate was 60% for composers, 73% for painters, 77% for novelists, and 87% for poets, which places completely sane poets in a distinct minority. A degree of insanity, however, is not much help unless it is mild or borderline; if the psychopathology results in early suicide or complete incapacitation, history does not record the individual as a creative genius. The balance appears to be: the creative genius is mad enough to be inventive or imaginative beyond the ordinary, to think outside conventions, but not so crazy that it interferes with productivity or self-control.
The last point seems crucial. Whatever the psychopathology of genius, if it is creatively productive, it will be because, as Simonton puts it, eminent creators possess “personal fortitude and self-discipline” which allow them to “exploit the strange ideas that fill their heads” without being overtaken by them. Anyone who has worked in a philosophy or physics department of a large university will be familiar with the crackpots who periodically show up at the office door clutching enormous manuscripts. Such obsessives, often suffering from paranoia and delusions of personal grandeur in addition to their scientific or philosophical delusions, are in many aspects of a kind with authentic geniuses: they quite possibly possess high IQs and a capacity to produce a high quantity of output (hence the size of the manuscript). The difference is that such men — and they are almost invariably men — are swallowed up in obsessions that they cannot assess or control. Simonton quotes the psychologist Albert Rothenberg comparing “authentic” with schizophrenic poets: “Unlike true poets, schizophrenic poets refuse to revise their initial drafts, revealing an inability to adopt a more objective perspective on their work. They are all inspiration without verification, variation without selection.”
My Philosophy and Literature Coeditor, Pat Henry, tells me about his friend, the late Raymond Carver. The gem-like masterpiece we know as the story Cathedral is the last of thirty-three drafts of the work. Carver said that he only knew he was done with a story when he got to the point that he went over it, adding commas, and looked at it yet again and started removing the commas added in the previous go ’round. Tales of Mozart tossing off uncorrected symphonies or Coleridge creating Kubla Khan in a single stroke are unusual in the operation of authentic creative genius; more typical would be Beethoven repeatedly going up blind alleys in composing the development of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. The creative genius may be impatient with his wife or colleagues, and have no time whatsoever for his landlord, but in his work he can be endlessly patient and self-critical. For those is close proximity, genius often appears obsessive, driven, compulsively fussy.
I’ve several times used the masculine pronoun here, and it’s not cavalier sexism. Simonton discusses gender differences in creative genius. These again take him back to Darwin, who himself noticed that in a wide range of animal species, including homo sapiens, males exhibit a greater variation, for good and for ill, than females. Given an individual animal that displays some markedly unusual characteristic relative to other members of its species — it is very unusually stupid, or aggressive, or curious, or strong, or imaginative, or psychotic, or vicious — the chances are it will be male. We can speculate on the selective causes for this (Simonton regards it as unknown), but it is as true with human beings as it is with elk or hummingbirds. In our ordinary daily experience of people, this fact shows itself in statistical differences between men and women some of which might be social and cultural, but some of which have a biological basis.
If you chart the distribution of intelligence or general life competence by plotting abilities against population, you get a standard Gaussian distribution, a bell curve, with most people toward the center and decreasing extremes on either side. However, the enhanced-variation principle for males works here as well. When you plot separately for men and women, you find that the female curve is higher at the center, and trails off, approaching zero faster toward the edges, making the women’s curve a tall, thin bell, relative to the male curve. The male curve is flatter in its general shape; it makes up for its relative lack of height by trailing off farther on either side, indicating the higher number of men than women at the extreme edges of the bell. This difference in distribution means that in the center of the curve, where most of us (both sexes) reside, women are found with a slightly greater frequency than men. Down at the low fringes of the bell curve, men are found in greater numbers than women: these include the sociopaths who populate prisons, institutionalized psychotics, where men very significantly out-number women, and what might have been called in another age “riff-raff”: persons who float at the edges of society, institutionalized or not, depending on their overt behavior toward others and the degree of their incapacity to care for themselves.