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Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity
How can we account for the sudden appearance of such dazzling artists and scientists as Mozart, Shakespeare, Darwin, or Einstein? How can we define such genius? What conditions or personality traits seem to produce exceptionally creative people? Is the association between genius and madness really just a myth? These and many other questions are brilliantly illuminated in The Origins of Genius .
Dean Simonton convincingly argues that creativity can best be understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. The artist or scientist generates a wealth of ideas, and then subjects these ideas to aesthetic or scientific judgment, selecting only those that have the best chance to survive and reproduce. Indeed, the true test of genius is the ability to bequeath an impressive and influential body of work to future generations. Simonton draws on the latest research into creativity and explores such topics as the personality type of the genius, whether genius is genetic or produced by environment and education, the links between genius and mental illness (Darwin himself was emotionally and mentally unwell), the high incidence of childhood trauma, especially loss of a parent, amongst Nobel Prize winners, the importance of unconscious incubation in creative problem-solving, and much more. Simonton substantiates his theory by examining and quoting from the work of such eminent
figures as Henri Poincare, W. H. Auden, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Niels Bohr, and many others.
For anyone intrigued by the spectacular feats of the human mind, The Origins of Genius offers a revolutionary new way of understanding the very nature of creativity.
Dean Simonton convincingly argues that creativity can best be understood as a Darwinian process of variation and selection. The artist or scientist generates a wealth of ideas, and then subjects these ideas to aesthetic or scientific judgment, selecting only those that have the best chance to survive and reproduce. Indeed, the true test of genius is the ability to bequeath an impressive and influential body of work to future generations. Simonton draws on the latest research into creativity and explores such topics as the personality type of the genius, whether genius is genetic or produced by environment and education, the links between genius and mental illness (Darwin himself was emotionally and mentally unwell), the high incidence of childhood trauma, especially loss of a parent, amongst Nobel Prize winners, the importance of unconscious incubation in creative problem-solving, and much more. Simonton substantiates his theory by examining and quoting from the work of such eminent
figures as Henri Poincare, W. H. Auden, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Niels Bohr, and many others.
For anyone intrigued by the spectacular feats of the human mind, The Origins of Genius offers a revolutionary new way of understanding the very nature of creativity.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
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569 people want to read
About the author
Dean Keith Simonton
26 books48 followersRenowned for his groundbreaking contributions to the study of genius, Dean Keith Simonton has provided his expertise to over 400 publications on the topic, including a dozen books entitled Genius, Creativity, and Leadership; Scientific Genius; Greatness; Genius and Creativity; Origins of Genius; Great Psychologists and Their Times; Creativity in Science; and Genius 101.
The recipient of several awards, Simonton’s work has been recognized by the William James Book Award, the Sir Francis Galton Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Creativity, the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts, the Theoretical Innovation Prize in Personality and Social Psychology, the George A. Miller Outstanding Article Award, the E. Paul Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and the Robert S. Daniel Award for Four-Year College/University Teaching.
A fellow of several professional organizations—including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, and nine divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA)—Simonton has served as president of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics and the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (APA, Division 10). Currently, he is the president-elect of the Society for General Psychology (APA, Division 1) and a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California. Dean Simonton obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975.
The recipient of several awards, Simonton’s work has been recognized by the William James Book Award, the Sir Francis Galton Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Creativity, the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts, the Theoretical Innovation Prize in Personality and Social Psychology, the George A. Miller Outstanding Article Award, the E. Paul Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and the Robert S. Daniel Award for Four-Year College/University Teaching.
A fellow of several professional organizations—including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, and nine divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA)—Simonton has served as president of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics and the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (APA, Division 10). Currently, he is the president-elect of the Society for General Psychology (APA, Division 1) and a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California. Dean Simonton obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 24, 2013
For Simonton, creative genius doesn’t just generate unusual connections, and associations, it somehow sees what is fruitful or appropriate in a domain: it is selective. There are six interrelated but distinguishable characteristics he identifies for persons who have this ability:
(1) Creative geniuses “harbor an impressive array of intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic interests.” This breadth and variety of interests gives them the content on which to draw analogies, make comparisons. It is their material. (I’d suppose that access to this material would be a differentially significant condition for outstanding creative work in different fields: teenage geniuses would be more likely to occur in music or mathematics than in philosophy or fiction.)
(2) Such individuals are “open to novel, complex, and ambiguous stimuli in their surroundings.” Openness takes their trains of thought to unexpected corners of experience.
(3) Creative geniuses are “capable of defocused attention.” I think of stories about Glenn Gould studying a score, carrying on a phone conversation, and listening to the news all at once — sounds implausible till you think back to how amazingly he could distinguish voices in a fugue. Typically, while creators are working on one problem, or are engaged in an apparently irrelevant activity, they will be carrying around with them another problem in need of a solution. Defocused attention makes creative connections more likely.
(4) Consistent with the above is a flexibility in work habits. It’s characteristic of the highly creative person to have a range of projects going simultaneously, a “network of enterprises.” Darwin was always working on several subjects simultaneously, dipping into “thirty or forty large portfolios” which he kept on labeled shelves, adding memoranda or reviewing them. This flexibility makes it possible to change course quickly and take advantage of lucky breaks and new ideas as they serendipitously present themselves.
(5) “Highly creative people are introverted.” Simonton means by this that, however affable they may be in social settings, they are given to “long hours of solitary contemplation . . . smoking a pipe in an armchair, taking a walk in the woods, engaging absentmindedly in some routine activity.” Social contact, for creative geniuses, is “subordinate to the internal ruminations of their eternally preoccupied minds.” This for Simonton explains why group problem-solving, so-called brainstorming, usually yields such dismal results compared to individual creative work.
(6) Finally, such individuals are usually “independent, autonomous, unconventional, and perhaps even iconoclastic.” They are willing to give unusual, or even preposterous, ideas a fair hearing.
To this list must be added a few more likely conditions. The foremost is productivity. Few geniuses come up with one staggering idea and then retire from the scene. In both sciences and arts, it’s characteristic of genius that it is immensely, even obsessively, productive. Quantity may not equal quality, Simonton says, nevertheless Nobel laureates publish twice as much on average as scientists good enough to make it into American Men and Women of Science. For nineteenth-century scientists, the mere length of their total bibliographies is a good predictor of how famous they will be today. Cases such as Gregor Mandel, the pioneer geneticist who published only a tiny body of work, are exceptional. This tends to extend into the arts, where the most outstanding geniuses — Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Dickens, Turner and Picasso, and the likes of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, and Wagner — astonish in their sheer capacity to produce work. We might imagine that for each of these figures there would be hundreds who wrote, painted, or composed as much but who are unknown or discounted today: a thousand Maria Corellis for every Dickens. If I read Simonton correctly, this is unlikely: vast output is not a sufficient condition for creative genius, but it is difficult to name a creative genius who was not highly productive.
(1) Creative geniuses “harbor an impressive array of intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic interests.” This breadth and variety of interests gives them the content on which to draw analogies, make comparisons. It is their material. (I’d suppose that access to this material would be a differentially significant condition for outstanding creative work in different fields: teenage geniuses would be more likely to occur in music or mathematics than in philosophy or fiction.)
(2) Such individuals are “open to novel, complex, and ambiguous stimuli in their surroundings.” Openness takes their trains of thought to unexpected corners of experience.
(3) Creative geniuses are “capable of defocused attention.” I think of stories about Glenn Gould studying a score, carrying on a phone conversation, and listening to the news all at once — sounds implausible till you think back to how amazingly he could distinguish voices in a fugue. Typically, while creators are working on one problem, or are engaged in an apparently irrelevant activity, they will be carrying around with them another problem in need of a solution. Defocused attention makes creative connections more likely.
(4) Consistent with the above is a flexibility in work habits. It’s characteristic of the highly creative person to have a range of projects going simultaneously, a “network of enterprises.” Darwin was always working on several subjects simultaneously, dipping into “thirty or forty large portfolios” which he kept on labeled shelves, adding memoranda or reviewing them. This flexibility makes it possible to change course quickly and take advantage of lucky breaks and new ideas as they serendipitously present themselves.
(5) “Highly creative people are introverted.” Simonton means by this that, however affable they may be in social settings, they are given to “long hours of solitary contemplation . . . smoking a pipe in an armchair, taking a walk in the woods, engaging absentmindedly in some routine activity.” Social contact, for creative geniuses, is “subordinate to the internal ruminations of their eternally preoccupied minds.” This for Simonton explains why group problem-solving, so-called brainstorming, usually yields such dismal results compared to individual creative work.
(6) Finally, such individuals are usually “independent, autonomous, unconventional, and perhaps even iconoclastic.” They are willing to give unusual, or even preposterous, ideas a fair hearing.
To this list must be added a few more likely conditions. The foremost is productivity. Few geniuses come up with one staggering idea and then retire from the scene. In both sciences and arts, it’s characteristic of genius that it is immensely, even obsessively, productive. Quantity may not equal quality, Simonton says, nevertheless Nobel laureates publish twice as much on average as scientists good enough to make it into American Men and Women of Science. For nineteenth-century scientists, the mere length of their total bibliographies is a good predictor of how famous they will be today. Cases such as Gregor Mandel, the pioneer geneticist who published only a tiny body of work, are exceptional. This tends to extend into the arts, where the most outstanding geniuses — Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Dickens, Turner and Picasso, and the likes of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, and Wagner — astonish in their sheer capacity to produce work. We might imagine that for each of these figures there would be hundreds who wrote, painted, or composed as much but who are unknown or discounted today: a thousand Maria Corellis for every Dickens. If I read Simonton correctly, this is unlikely: vast output is not a sufficient condition for creative genius, but it is difficult to name a creative genius who was not highly productive.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 9, 2016
Origins of Genius by Dean Keith Simonton is idea dense study of the origin and nature of creativity from a Darwinian perspective, not a study of genius in the popular sense of the word. Simonton convincingly explains his choice of using eminence as a measure of genius rather than test measurements of raw intelligence.
Using Charles Darwin as an example of creativity and eminence throughout the book, Simonton looks at the cognitive processes that give rise to new ideas with a mixture of individual reports of eminent individuals, scientific studies and modern computer models of creativity, making sure to set a distinction between primary and secondary Darwinian models.
I found the section discussing the creative output of individuals of eminence and the section discussioning blind selection and selection retention in cognitive functioning the most interesting sections the book. The fact that total output and being cited are two of the best indicators of eminence sheds doubt on the common perception that quality is the most important aspect of creative works.
The discussion of the developmental change of creative products is also worth noting, especially the sections discussion Martindale’s empirical analysis of the development of artistic styles using primordial cognition and aesthetic selection to follow the course of the product until primordial cognition begins to disintegrate, creating a cyclical pattern of artistic production.
It’s hard to do justice to the amount of information touched upon in this book in a short review. It is a book ripe with ideas that will change the way the reader views the creative process and it will change the way the reader understands the eminent figures throughout world history.
If you’re interested in eminent individuals, the process of creativity, Darwinian models of cognition or just better wish to understand the workings of the human mind, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I will be reading it again.
Using Charles Darwin as an example of creativity and eminence throughout the book, Simonton looks at the cognitive processes that give rise to new ideas with a mixture of individual reports of eminent individuals, scientific studies and modern computer models of creativity, making sure to set a distinction between primary and secondary Darwinian models.
I found the section discussing the creative output of individuals of eminence and the section discussioning blind selection and selection retention in cognitive functioning the most interesting sections the book. The fact that total output and being cited are two of the best indicators of eminence sheds doubt on the common perception that quality is the most important aspect of creative works.
The discussion of the developmental change of creative products is also worth noting, especially the sections discussion Martindale’s empirical analysis of the development of artistic styles using primordial cognition and aesthetic selection to follow the course of the product until primordial cognition begins to disintegrate, creating a cyclical pattern of artistic production.
It’s hard to do justice to the amount of information touched upon in this book in a short review. It is a book ripe with ideas that will change the way the reader views the creative process and it will change the way the reader understands the eminent figures throughout world history.
If you’re interested in eminent individuals, the process of creativity, Darwinian models of cognition or just better wish to understand the workings of the human mind, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I will be reading it again.
October 7, 2014
As the title indicates, an evolutionary explanation for the rise of genius. This book requires, if not an already-present aptitude for biology, a willingness to follow the author's train of thought. It is obvious that this book is written for a fairly specialized audience, because no real effort is made to make the undoubtedly fascinating material palatable. The author, instead, like a good scientist, overloads the prose with this study and that study and gets bogged down in various plausible biological explanations which make getting through this tome a bit of a struggle.
Nevertheless, as I said, the subject matter is fascinating, and while the book is slightly difficult to read, it is not impossible. The author clearly differentiates between primary darwinism, which is natural selection on the organic level, and secondary darwinism, which is natural selection on the sociocultural level. The author argues that genius is uniquely equipped to increase its adaptive fitness in the sociocultural sphere (here, the author is drawing on Dawkins' notion of the meme), by being more ready than most to engage in a trial-and-error blind variation selection process. This is the crux of the text, as the author investigates various facets of genius that allow this unusually vigorous adaptive struggle in the sociocultural sphere, including with a discussion on the thinking processes that are unique to genius and which help them come up with fresh 'ideational variations', the role of culture and personality in either hindering or furthering genius. The author is a fairly strict determinist in this latter aspect, believing genius to be mostly genetic. One remaining minor quibble that I have is that the author isn't quite sure where he comes down on the genius issue. He seems initially to favor the view that genius is an adaptive phenomenon forced into existence by the selection pressures of the sociocultural milieu. Later, when discussing emergenesis (offspring inheriting genes that are not those of their parents, but rather, perhaps of their great-grandparents, i.e. of genes emerging suddenly after a period of 'hibernation'), he seems to lean towards an explanation of genius as that of a 'freak of nature'. This inability to come down strictly on one side is perhaps to be expected from a scientist, but it does mean that the book doesn't really read like a book, but more like a dissertation.
In conclusion, I would say that this is a worthwhile text for life sciences students, and those interested in evolutionary biology and who have read a few of the classic tomes of that genre and are thus well versed with slightly in depth evolutionary explanations.
Nevertheless, as I said, the subject matter is fascinating, and while the book is slightly difficult to read, it is not impossible. The author clearly differentiates between primary darwinism, which is natural selection on the organic level, and secondary darwinism, which is natural selection on the sociocultural level. The author argues that genius is uniquely equipped to increase its adaptive fitness in the sociocultural sphere (here, the author is drawing on Dawkins' notion of the meme), by being more ready than most to engage in a trial-and-error blind variation selection process. This is the crux of the text, as the author investigates various facets of genius that allow this unusually vigorous adaptive struggle in the sociocultural sphere, including with a discussion on the thinking processes that are unique to genius and which help them come up with fresh 'ideational variations', the role of culture and personality in either hindering or furthering genius. The author is a fairly strict determinist in this latter aspect, believing genius to be mostly genetic. One remaining minor quibble that I have is that the author isn't quite sure where he comes down on the genius issue. He seems initially to favor the view that genius is an adaptive phenomenon forced into existence by the selection pressures of the sociocultural milieu. Later, when discussing emergenesis (offspring inheriting genes that are not those of their parents, but rather, perhaps of their great-grandparents, i.e. of genes emerging suddenly after a period of 'hibernation'), he seems to lean towards an explanation of genius as that of a 'freak of nature'. This inability to come down strictly on one side is perhaps to be expected from a scientist, but it does mean that the book doesn't really read like a book, but more like a dissertation.
In conclusion, I would say that this is a worthwhile text for life sciences students, and those interested in evolutionary biology and who have read a few of the classic tomes of that genre and are thus well versed with slightly in depth evolutionary explanations.
November 29, 2024
O analiză între condiția de geniu și Darwin
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