منتديات منابر ثقافية - عرض مشاركة واحدة - هل تولد الحياة من رحم الموت؟؟؟ دراسة بحثية

09-11-2013, 09:10 AM

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But just as this variability characteristic insures that there are more crazy, subnormal males than females off at the low end of the curve, it also makes for more above-normal males, crazed or sane, at the high end. (Straddling both categories are the idiot savants, who predictably are much more often male: people who are unable to tie their shoes but who can instantly tell you the score of every World Series game ever played.) At the high end will be found the nut-cases who show up at my ofﬁce door clutching their manuscripts, as well as highly intelligent obsessive and compulsive people of every eccentric description. I have talked with feminists who fret about the absence of women at the highest strata of historically important achievement in the sciences and the arts. Certainly they are partially right that historical sexism has to be a factor in this, and Simonton himself respectfully summarizes the arguments that explain the absence of women at the higher edges in terms of gender stereotyping and the impediments created by domestic life. But even if in future years social conditions are changed to encourage greater equality of achievement between the sexes, actual gender parity is about as likely to occur in the intellectual ionosphere of creative genius as it is in the realm of severe psychotics or idiot-savants. This is a matter of male variation — which increases more than female variation as you move out from the mean in either direction — and Gaussian distributions. So while the difference in IQ between men and women is trivial in the center of the curve, differences increase as you move up the scale, so that at IQ 175 there will be around 47 men for every woman (mirroring the many more low-IQ men at the other side of the curve). That these weird ones at the high end of the curve include more men than women is a worry we ought to place into perspective. Did those who worry ever share an apartment with a male example of one of these people? If so, was the personal and mental condition of said genius something they’d wish on the sisterhood? The disparity between the male/female distribution curves shows that on average women function through life with greater competence and stability than men. This too is intelligence.
The frequently unhappy psychopathology of creative geniuses is accompanied by another unfortunate feature of their lives: they often experience severe adversity in childhood. According to Simonton, there is good statistical evidence that “the development of genius may sometimes be enhanced by traumatic or adverse experiences in childhood and adolescence.” Many had chronic disabilities or illnesses in childhood, and a markedly disproportionate number lost a parent in childhood. One study of 699 eminent ﬁgures showed that 45% had lost a parent before age 21; another study indicated that one-third of creative geniuses had lost their father early in life. A quarter of eminent mathematicians had lost a parent before age ten. Another study of British Prime Ministers found that 63% had lost a parent, a number much higher than a comparable control group of English peers. Simonton gives three possible explanations for this, none of them compelling (achievement becomes an emotional compensation, a form of bereavement; adverse events produce a robust and persistent personality; a non-conventional career path is set by the loss of a parent). However the stats are to be explained, from the standpoint of some potential creative geniuses, Dylan Thomas was right to remark that the only thing worse than an unhappy childhood was “having a too-happy childhood.” (Sad to think of today’s moms and dads out there pumping extra oxygen and prenatal Mozart into the womb, or teaching calculus to their preschoolers. What the historical record shows is that parents who wish their tots to achieve greatness should beat them regularly, destroy their self-esteem, and cruelly deprive them of ordinary comforts, such as ice cream, toys, or their mothers’ affections. It would be especially helpful for one of the parents, probably dad, to die before the onset of adolescence; suicide is ﬁne for the purpose.)
As for school, university, and grades: scholastic performance does not correlate well with genius, nor does the attainment of high levels of education. In fact, a four-year Ph.D correlates with a lowered probability of creative eminence than somewhat less education. What does count as a distinct advantage in the United States is being a ﬁrst or second generation immigrant, or being Jewish. Nearly 20% of Nobel Prize winners have some kind of Jewish background, vastly exceeding the proportion of Jews in world population. Simonton suggests that a sense of marginality, along with the bilingualism typical of many European Jews and Jewish immigrants to the U.S., encourages Jewish creativity. This is in line with the fact that a disproportionate number of creative minds have been members of minority churches in their homelands, have been ethnically marginalized immigrants, and have come from the margins, or in the case of scientists, from outside the profession in which they made their mark. Simonton also gives much attention to Frank Sulloway’s thesis that ﬁrst-born children tend to be conservative in outlook, whereas later-born children are more prone to be radical and unconventional in their views (so, for instance, were Darwin and Wallace, and their supporters Ernst Haeckel and T. H. Huxley, later-borns, while their conservative opponents, including Louis Agassiz and John Herschel, were ﬁrst-borns).
Particularly when discussing such statistics, Simonton tends to rely on data drawn from the history of science. He is in general much weaker in discussing the history of artistic genius and sometimes writes as though oblivious to systematic differences between genius in science and in art. There’s a remark I’ve heard attributed to Werner Heisenberg, though it’s hard to believe it doesn’t have an earlier provenance: if Einstein had died as a child, someone else would have discovered General Relativity; if Beethoven had died as a child, the Opus 111 Sonata would never have been written. This is not a difference of degree; it shows that the products of science and of art have very different natures. A scientist need only make a single stunning discovery to receive the laurel wreath of eminence. The greatest artists have a quality of mind that allows them to produce works of genius over and over, rather than work up to one or two great discoveries. Simonton, it seems to me, doesn’t quite get it. “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was created just once,” he says. “Yet, by the same token, only Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, and probably was the only scientist who could have done so. Not even Wallace claimed that he could have carried the banner of evolutionary theory nearly as well.” This is surprisingly confused: Darwin’s fame rests not on the writing of a book ﬁlled with facts and expressed in a style that is as much uniquely his as the Fifth Symphony is Beethoven’s. Darwin is famous because he developed (with Wallace) the theory of evolution by natural selection. Other people, including obviously Wallace, could have done that alone, if not by the 1850s, then later; in fact, it is absolutely inevitable that the theory of evolution would eventually have been developed. If Darwin had written everything he wrote about plants and animals without discovering evolution by natural (and sexual) selection, he’d be today barely remembered as an industrious descriptive naturalist, but nothing more. Darwin’s thoroughness, his rich command of empirical detail, and his imposing style certainly aided in the acceptance of evolution; probably his family connections and social class had something to do with it as well. But he was not the only scientist who could have discovered it; the disanalogy with Beethoven’s creativity is glaring.
Simonton’s failure to appreciate the different character of artistic creativity has him making peculiar observations about artists. His insistence on thinking about the history of aesthetic creation in terms of the history of science inclines him to concentrate much attention on Colin Martindale, whose excellent book, The Clockwork Muse (enthusiastically reviewed in this column in 1994), shows how art style changes through time according to patterns dictated by mechanisms of human consciousness and perception. Martindale does indeed write about the history of art in ways that might resemble an account of the history of science, or even philosophy. But if you ask about what captures audiences so completely in the experience of individual works of art, so compellingly that we call them “works of genius,” it’s hardly ever the historic signiﬁcance, which we normally consider in cool reﬂection. In science, it is the truth of a theory and the value of its applications which leave us awestruck; in art, our awe is for the individual experience of the work. Proliﬁc genius-artists can produce staggeringly beautiful objects again and again. Beethoven produced nine symphonies, any single one of which would be remembered and played today, had he produced that one symphony alone.
Collingwood pointed out that artists cannot set out with objective certainty that they will create a good work of art. This is unlike the situation of the competent craftsman who can be certain that he or she can build a good table, given the right tools and materials. Simonton goes wrong trying to develop an argument similar to Collingwood’s: creative products in the arts and sciences cannot be treated “as repeated performances of some creative expertise.” All Simonton grants for artists is that they will acquire a capacity very early on that will allow them to make technically competent work and that this capacity will probably stay with them all their lives (unless, to use his example, they succumb like Robert Schumann to mental illness). But then what distinguishes Beethoven from Churubini, Chopin from Kalkbrenner, Shostakovich from Khrennikov? Even the careers of the supreme artistic creators, Simonton says, do not escape the principle of variation and selection: “even a genius cannot escape the Darwinian reality that a creative life consists of hits and misses.” But this begs the question of why there are people such as Mozart, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Raphael, and others who appear to execute so few misses. To explain that their aim is better is like saying that it’s raining hard because there’s so much water coming down out of the sky.
The fundamental problem with Simonton’s analysis, it seems to me, stems from his concentration on the history of science and his preoccupation with the life of Charles Darwin. It is perfectly plausible to describe scientiﬁc genius on the model of (1) a highly intelligent mind (2) capable of imaginative leaps and unusual metaphorical/ analogical thinking that (3) applies itself assiduously to a complex subject matter and (4) over years of trial and error and listening to criticism (5) comes up with a masterpiece of scientiﬁc insight. That is how he speciﬁcally thinks of the production of The Origin of Species, but he also claims the same process “underlies the production of other masterworks,” including works of art: “In examining the unedited notebooks and sketchbooks of others that led to the emergence of some acclaimed product, we can see the same chaos of trial and error. For example, Picasso’s Guernica — perhaps his greatest painting — clearly originated in this fashion.” Simonton says that “Picasso’s sketchbooks and notebooks are replete with false starts and wild experiments,” and that he lavished more time and effort on these sketches than he actually used for the painting itself. But this strikes me as implying a most eccentric view of artistic creation. In the ﬁrst place, the sketches and cartoons for Guernica include many wonderful works of art: you can mount an entire exhibition on the sketches alone (I know this because I’ve seen one — thirty years ago and the memory stays with me). There is no analogy here with the false starts of scientiﬁc genius, which have only historic/biographical or merely psychological interest to a scholar.

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