Authors: Eric Weiner
I have been watching this evolving—or, rather, devolving—concept of genius for a while now. I am fascinated by the subject of genius in much the way a naked man is fascinated by the subject of clothing. Are we really in a downward genius spiral, or is there hope for us, and even for me?
Genius
. The word beguiles, but do I really know what it means? It comes to us from the Latin
genius
, but it meant something very different in Roman times. Back then, a genius was a presiding deity that followed you everywhere, much like a helicopter parent only with supernatural powers. (The word
genie
stems from the same root.) Every person had a genius. Every place, too. Cities, towns, and marketplaces, all possessed their own presiding spirit, a genius loci, that continuously animated them. The current dictionary definition—“extraordinary intellectual power esp. as manifested in creative activity”—is a product of the eighteenth-century Romantics, those brooding poets who suffered,
suffered
for their art and, we’d now say, for their
creativity
, a word that is even more recent; it didn’t come along until 1870 and wasn’t in widespread use until the 1950s.
Some use
genius
to describe a very smart person—someone with a high IQ—but that is overly narrow, and misleading. Plenty of people with extremely high IQs have accomplished little, and conversely, plenty of people of “average” intelligence have done great things. No, I am speaking of genius in the creative sense—as the highest form of creativity.
My favorite definition of creative genius comes from researcher and artificial-intelligence expert Margaret Boden. The creative genius, she says, is someone with “the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising, and valuable.” Those also are the criteria the US Patent Office uses when deciding whether an invention deserves a patent.
Consider something as simple as a coffee cup. I might invent one that is painted an unusual shade of fluorescent orange. Yes, it is new, but
not especially surprising or all that useful. Now let’s say I invent a coffee cup with no bottom. That is certainly new, and definitely surprising, but, again, not particularly useful. No, to qualify for a patent, I would have to invent, say, a self-cleaning coffee cup or a folding one that doubles as a flash drive—something that fulfilled all three criteria: new, surprising, and useful. The toddler steps of incremental innovation don’t earn you a patent, or the title of genius. Only a leap does.
The question that intrigues someone such as myself, a creature of geography and a student of history, is not simply what these leaps look like but where, and when, they take place. So I decided to conduct another experiment of sorts, this time minus the water balloon. I embarked on a version of the old Grand Tour, those trips abroad that young English gentry took in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to broaden their horizons. I am no gentry and, as I said, no genius. College was a blur of cheap beer and unsuitable women. I wish I had paid more attention. This time, I vowed, would be different. This time I would heed the advice of my father-in-law. “Young man,” he’d say in his musical, indeterminate accent, “You need to ed-u-cate yourself.”
My education begins in London, a city that has produced not only its share of geniuses but also the study of genius itself. If you’re like me and fascinated by the so-called science of genius—or like to furtively stick small pins into pieces of felt—then you don’t want to miss the Galton Box. You can find it, as I did, at London’s University College.
One overcast morning, a spring tease in the air, I hop the tube to King’s Cross Station, then walk a few hundred yards to the university’s Hogwartsian campus. There, I am greeted by Subhadra Das, keeper of the Box. I like her immediately. Something about her smile and the way she looks me in the eye is reassuring. She leads me down an unassuming corridor to an unassuming room where we find the Box, resting on a table. She dons a pair of latex gloves then, carefully, as if performing neurosurgery on a gerbil, reaches into the Box.
The Galton Box contains the worldly possessions of one Sir Francis Galton. It’s an odd collection, befitting an odd but brilliant man. Galton,
a nineteenth-century scientist and polymath, a cousin of Charles Darwin’s, brought the world statistical analysis and the questionnaire, composite portraiture and forensic fingerprints. He was one of the first meteorologists. He coined the phrase
nature versus nurture
. He had an IQ of nearly 200.
Galton’s motto was “Count whenever you can!” To him, anything worth doing was worth doing numerically, and he once confessed that he couldn’t fully grasp a problem unless he was first able to “disembarrass it of words.” Socially, he was awkward in the extreme, more comfortable with integers than people.
Subhadra extracts a piece of felt and several pins from the Box. She gingerly places them on the table. These, she explains, were Galton’s tools for one of his quirkier experiments: an attempt to devise a “beauty map” of Great Britain. He wanted to determine where the most beautiful women of the land lived, then plot the results on a map. This being Victorian times, though, and Galton’s being so shy, he couldn’t very well hold a beauty contest.
Galton’s solution was to stand on street corners in various cities and, with felt and pins tucked discreetly in his overcoat pocket, watch women walk by. If he saw an attractive woman (in his opinion), he stuck four pins into the felt. Less attractive women got three pins, and so on. He traveled across the United Kingdom surreptitiously ranking women’s appearances this way, and presumably not raising any eyebrows. He concluded that the most attractive women lived in London, the least attractive in the Scottish city of Aberdeen.
The world did not pay much attention to Galton’s beauty map, but it did take notice of his landmark book,
Hereditary Genius.
Published in 1869, it delved deep into the family pedigrees of eminent creators, leaders, and athletes. Galton believed that these people owed their success to genetics, or what he called “natural abilities.” For Galton, genetics explained everything. It explained why one family might contain several eminent members and another none. It explained why societies with many immigrants and refugees were often successful, since these newcomers “introduced a valuable strain of blood.” It explained why some nations succeeded more
than others (elucidated in a chapter with the unfortunate title “The Comparative Worth of Races”). It explained the decline of once-great civilizations—the ancient Greeks, for instance, had begun to intermarry with “lesser” peoples, thus diluting their bloodline. In the end, it explained why every one of his geniuses was a white man, like him, living on a small, gloomy island off the coast of continental Europe. As for women, Galton only mentions them once, in a chapter called “Literary Men.”
Galton’s book was well received, and no wonder. It articulated, in scientific language, what people had suspected for a long time: geniuses are born, not made.
Subhadra carefully places the pins and felt back into the Galton Box. She confides that she has mixed feelings about the Box, and about Galton, who came from a privileged background yet was blind to the advantages such status bestowed upon him and his friends.
“He thought he was living in a meritocracy,” she says. Yet, at the same time, she can’t deny that he was brilliant. He was the first to measure things we thought were unmeasurable and, she says, slipping off the gloves, “question things we thought were unquestionable.” Galton single-handedly wrested the subject of creative genius from the hands of the poets and the mystics and placed it squarely in the hands of the scientists.
His notion of hereditary genius, though, was dead wrong. Genius is not passed down like blue eyes or baldness. There is no genius gene; one genius has yet to beget another. Civilizations do not rise and fall because of shifting gene pools. Yes, when it comes to creative genius, genes are part of the mix, but a relatively small part, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent, psychologists estimate.
The geniuses-are-born myth has been supplanted by another myth: geniuses are made. On the face of it, this seems true. It takes hard work, at least ten thousand hours of practice, over ten years, to begin to approach mastery, let alone genius, as one well-known study found. Modern psychology has, in other words, unearthed empirical evidence for Edison’s old saw about success being 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.
This component, sweat, adds another piece to the picture, an
important piece. The picture, though, remains incomplete. Something is missing. But what? That question nags at me, like one of Galton’s mathematical puzzles, as I walk briskly across the Victorian campus, the spring tease replaced by a light but persistent rain.
A few months and some seven thousand miles later, I find myself at yet another campus, in the presence of yet another box. This box contains index cards. There must be hundreds of them. On each card, written in tiny but perfectly legible handwriting, is a historic event and the name of an eminent person who lived at the time. The Italian Renaissance and Michelangelo, for instance. The cards are neatly categorized by date and place. It’s all so methodical, so Galtonian, I think. The owner of this box, though, is very much alive and kicking. He is standing before me now, shaking my hand vigorously.
Dean Keith Simonton is tan and fit. He’s on sabbatical but you wouldn’t know it judging by his boundless energy and frenetic schedule. He’s wearing jeans and flip-flops and, as he does every day, a T-shirt with an illustration of a genius or leader emblazoned on it. (Today, it is Oscar Wilde.) A mountain bike is propped against the bookshelf. Schubert is playing softly in the background. The California sun streams through the window.
Simonton is a professor of psychology at the University of California–Davis and a self-confessed intellectual spelunker. He loves nothing more than exploring unknown depths, places where others fear to go, owing to the darkness and the loneliness. In that sense, too, he reminds me of Galton. Also, like Galton, Simonton is obsessed with the study of genius and has a serious numbers addiction. (“How are your differential equations?” he asks me at one point. Not so good, how are yours?)
Unlike Galton, though, Simonton does not stick pins into pieces of felt and is perfectly capable of eye contact and other basic social niceties. Unlike Galton, he does not hail from a privileged background. His family was blue-collar, his father a high school dropout. And, crucially, unlike Galton, Simonton does not suffer from an ethnocentric bias. He sees the world clearly, and he is onto something big.
Simonton’s obsession, like most, began early. In kindergarten, his family bought a set of the
World Book Encyclopedia.
He was instantly enthralled. He would spend hours gazing at the photos of Einstein and Darwin and other geniuses the way other kids gawk at photos of baseball players and pop stars. Even at that age, he was fascinated not only by the achievements of these godlike men and women, but the way their lives intersected in unexpected ways. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo squabbling on the streets of Florence. Freud and Einstein kibitzing over coffee in Berlin.
In college, Simonton took a course on the history of civilization, but ever the scientist, his papers were peppered with mathematical equations—“fame is directly proportional to the occurrence of name; that is F =
n(N)
”—and references to the laws of thermodynamics. His professor was nonplussed and wrote a stern rebuke: “If you think of the historical process as rigidly as universal laws are conceived of, then you will probably have great difficulty understanding history.” Simonton has spent the last fifty years proving that professor wrong. He earned a PhD in psychology and devoted himself to the embryonic field of “geniusology.”
It hasn’t been easy. Academia, for all its professions of broad-mindedness, doesn’t take kindly to troublemakers. This was the 1960s and ’70s, a time when creativity and genius were not subjects the academy took seriously, which seems odd, given that universities are supposedly in the business of producing geniuses, but less odd when you consider that, as the author Robert Grudin so astutely observed, “there are two types of subjects that a culture studies little: those which it despises and those which it holds dearest.” The subject of genius manages to fit both types. We hold dear the notion of the solitary creator, courageously overcoming the odds, vanquishing the confederacy of dunces allied against her. Yet we secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) despise the know-it-all, especially one with dangerous new ideas.
“When I told people of my plans to study genius, they thought I was nuts,” Simonton tells me. “They actually gave me a list of the academic journals that I would
not
be published in.” Simonton, by his own account a stubborn man, was determined to prove them wrong.
Over the past half century, he has pioneered the obscure but fascinating field of historiometrics. It’s the study of past epochs using the tools of modern social science, mainly statistics. Historiometrics is a kind of psychological autopsy, only the postmortem is performed not on a single individual but on an entire society. It isn’t interested in the usual history, though. It cares little for wars and assassinations and sundry disasters. No, the field is interested in the bright spots of history, the epochs that spawned beautiful art and brilliant philosophy and scientific breakthroughs.
Early in his career, Simonton homed in on a phenomenon central to the field of historiometrics: the appearance of genius fluctuates over place and time. Geniuses do not pop up randomly—one in Siberia, another in Bolivia—but in groupings. Genius clusters. Athens in 450 BC. Florence in AD 1500. Certain places, at certain times, produced a bumper crop of brilliant minds and good ideas.
The question is why. We now know it’s not genetic. These golden ages come and go much more quickly than gene pools change. So what was it? Climate? Money? Dumb luck?