Early parental death and genius

“One of the first things that stands out is the frequency with which these subjects report the death (reaction end) of a parent during their childhood.”


American genius and creativity theory psychologist Dean Simonton, from his 1991 chapter “When Giftedness Becomes Genius: How Does Talent Achieve Eminence?”, summarizes the phenomenon as follows:

“For both creators and leaders, the percentage of geniuses who lost one or both parents before reaching early adulthood is appreciably larger than what appears to hold in the general population or any other comparable group.”

Simonton buttresses this statement by citing Walberg, Rasher, and Parkerson (1980); Berrington (1974); Silverman (1974); and Martindale (1972), which, he seems to indicate, are just a few examples. [2]

Scientific revolutions

A large percentage of the leaders of scientific revolutions have been the product of an early parental death childhood; namely: Copernican revolution (Nicolaus Copernicus, father age 10), Newtonian revolution (Isaac Newton, father age 0), Darwinian revolution (Charles Darwin, mother age 8), Maxwellian revolution (James Maxwell, mother age 8), Goethean revolution (Goethe, blue baby; Libb Thims, mother age 12), to name a few

Dual Nobel Prize winners

Among individual to have one two Nobel Prizes, as depicted adjacent, namely Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen, and Frederick Sanger, 3 out of 4 have been the product of an early parental death childhood.

Discussion

American genius and creativity theory psychologist Dean Simonton argues, in his 1999 Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity, that parents who are more intelligent tend to delay reproduction until later in their existence, after their professional careers are established, stating that data shows that parents of eminent personalities were older than is the norm when their illustrious progeny were born—he gives the example of Darwin’s mother being in her 50s when she ended—and argues that heightened education level in correlation with heightened age of the parent may be the explanation for the anomaly over that of traumatic experiences, meaning that geniuses' parents were older, older people have a higher death rate, and that this explains the anomaly. [5]

This argument, however, does not seem to align with way in which elite geniuses view their situation and the great intensity and voracity about which they conduct their remaining days. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, founder of what might be called the atheism revolution, whose father (age 36) ended when he was five, would go on to hold to a philosophy centered around the the idea of "life-affirmation", involving an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. [8] In this sense, early parental death would seem to trigger a sort of non-status quo, culturally-unbounded, orthodox-questioning energy release reaction phenomenon, whereby those activities which drain creativity and progress toward solution are strictly avoided.

Likewise, Scottish physicist James Maxwell, one of the most intellectually deep and prolific of scientific geniuses, all through his days was acutely aware of his end, as exemplified by the fact that he penned his rare inner in his last and dying poem, “A Paradoxical Ode” (1878), written in his final year as he was in the final stages of stomach cancer, as he went into his 48th year, the same age his mother died previously from the same disease.

Terminology

Of note, in regards to terminology (see: life terminology upgrades) a person is a molecule (technically a powered animate chemical) and, technically speaking (see: defunct theory of life), and molecules cannot “die” but only be formed (de-formed) or synthesized (or de-synthesized); hence, it is more scientifically accurate to speak of “end” or “termination” of a parent as compared to the defunct term “death” of a parent; a comparative example being someone speaking about the death of the water molecule H2O in a water sodium reaction. For the sake of Internet search functionability, however, in this article, the older religio-mythology term "death" will be retained in the title, over that of either the politically-neutral term "loss", which implies that something has been lost (which is a blurry conception), or the scientifically-correct terms "termination" or "end", but which are less palatable.

See also

â—ڈ Founders of thermodynamics and suicide

“For both creators and leaders, the percentage of geniuses who lost one or both parents before reaching early adulthood is appreciably larger than what appears to hold in the general population or any other comparable group.”