Slashdot Mirror
Marriage May Tame Genius
theodp writes "Here's one to share with the wife and kids. Using a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand has concluded that creative genius is turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, regardless of age."
Being married--and raising children--is hard work.
Most recognized genuses have the luxury of working with little to no distraction. When you have a wife, financial trouble, and screaming children, it's rather hard to plumb the secrets of the universe.
This is no surprise to anyone.
If you are young single and have no children you obviously value your work very highly. Marriage is not too bad, your work is still important but your wife takes away from your work slightly.
I belive the biggest change comes when your children are born, after which your whole life changes. You no longer live for yourslef but ever decision is based on the children. They are the most important thing in your life, work is nothing....!
A proud father.
There is no god
There's a simple reason why. In any good committed relationship, your partner usually comes in first place on the priority list. For a scientist to make a great contribution, you have to have 2 things: (1) Almost fanatical devotion to your field of study. (2) Luck. Having a wife and kids to look after doesn't leave much time and attention to a scientific study.
Diji
"I came, I saw, I WTF'd!"
Are we supposed to guess women aren't affected by this? Maybe the study isnt sexist but the article covering it sure is...
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Dr Kanazawa suggests "a single psychological mechanism" is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women.
Isn't this what Freud said nearly 100 years ago?
They dont do real research at the University of New Zealand. All the greatest UFO and Bigfoot researchers are based there.
They're more interested in publicity than science. I fail to see anything credible in this research, other than some guy trying to 'shock conventions' with his 'radical theories'.
I work with three guys who used to be programming gods -- one of them whipped up an emergency replacement for one of our production systems in Perl in a single weekend. (This was a production system that was about 500,000 lines of C code.) And then, in one summer, all three of them got married (not to each other.) And it's just like their brains went to jelly. Their code is complete shit, it looks like something that a college student would write in a Pascal 101 course. Seriously. And these were guys who used to be the best in the bunch, bar-none. It was bizarre. It wasn't even gradual, it was just like a boulder plummeting from a cliff. *whoosh*
:)
It's not just the coding, either. Want to go have a couple of beers after work? Sorry, wife won't let me. Water-skiing at the lake this weekend? No, kid's got a recital. Travel to Australia to install a system down there? I wish I could, but my wife's sick. Bah. I fully intend on getting married at some point in time, but for now I intend on remaining a valuable contributor to the company and actually do something worthwhile with my work output. Besides, there's nothing wrong with wild monkey sex with chicks from the bar, and they don't care a bit if you have some beers after work
It seems quite a stretch to go from 25% of married scientists to the claim "the great minds who married virtually kissed goodbye to making any further glorious additions to their CV." Last I looked, 75% was a pretty sizable majority. And what was the percentage of unmarried men of similar ages who had also made their last significant contribution?
Of course, saying "A fair amount of married scientists" doesn't make for a good headline ...
...they are trying to raise a nice headline to publicise their work.
"Marriage tames Genius" is so much better a headline than "Genius burns out, then gets married."
Remember, causality is very hard to prove either way.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
I guess this means that women never really make great contributions to science since they are not "young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women".
Why, oh why, does everything have to come back to testosterone for these people? It is, quite possibly, the most overrated hormone of all time. I believe the results are correct, but this causality argument is total bullstuff.
This has nothing to do with man-juice, and everything to do with the allocation of time. You simply cannot build a successful happy relationship with a woman if you are not willing to put her first in your schedule.
As a single, I had approximately 8 more hours per day of play time when nothing was pre-scheduled for me. THAT'S where my 'research' time went -- yardwork, making dinner together, visiting the in-laws, going to movies. You do the math.
I wouldn't trade it for the world, though - well worth the investment.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Man, before I was all 'boyfriend' I was such a fun-loving punk-assed drunk of a geek, and it was FUN! I'd pop pills and drink all the time and geek for days on end. I learned so much back then, it would take me a decade to learn now what took only twoi years when I had that sort of... un-focus in my life.
Now I'm so tired from the commute and the 9-to-5 and I have to pay attention to all this other shit (cats, girlfriend, email, bills, car care, lawn, landlord) I don't have any room left for being creative.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Apparently Dr Kanazawa has never had to remove several Hot Wheels cars from the innards of a toilet full of crap. Yeah, I might be a great computer guy, but it takes a pretty creative mind to stay ahead of the creative minds of my children. We used to lock certain doors in our house to keep our kids out of those rooms. It turns out that I inadvertently trained them all in the art of lock picking. If you want to look into the human mind, raise some kids and put a few obstacles in front of them and watch their minds work. It's truly fascinating.
I am the proud parent of 5 kids. Hey, if the intelligent part of the population doesn't reproduce, then it's all left up to the dummies. Have you ever SEEN the people on the Jerry Springer show. The world would be better off if our scientists would get off their butts and start raising kids with the same love of science that they have rather than try to eek out a few more discoveries after their 30s.
"Dr Kanazawa suggests "a single psychological mechanism" is responsible for this: the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women. "
As a young female scientist, I object to the slightest intimation of the idea that the only way good science gets done is because young (presumably male) scientists are trying to compete for female attention. How many young male scientists out their have managed to impress girls with their thesis results anyway?
On the other hand, I find it entirely plausible that scientists of both genders who get married and have families often find their priorities rearranged. Discovering that having a family means a less obsessive attention to your career shouldn't be a surprise to anyone with a balanced view of life.
Luckily for many male scientists at institutions such as the one where I'm a student (MIT), they DO have wives who often stay home at least part time, enabling them to maintain something close to the obsessively competitive hours they put in before marriage and kids. That applies for all but one of the male professors in my department. For female scientists, it's much rarer to have a house-husband. The two female professors in my department only manage because their salary combined with their husband's allows them to hire people to help with household chores and raising the kids. Any female scientist who can't come up with a substitute for a housewife finds it very, very difficult to compete.
"creative genius is turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children"
The study does not detail cause and effect. Maybe the geniuses who married and started a family chose to do so because they no longer wanted to be engaged in their former pursuits as opposed to marriage and kids killing their output.
My common sense and observation lead me to believe the above interpretation is just plain silly. Marriage, relationships, and family take time and commitment to work. If you can juggle this within a schedule and maintain a commitment to your interests then your creative output will not be significantly impacted.
My father is among the top computer scientists in networking. He is responsible for some of the greatest advancements you are currently using. He has helped found numerous successful companies. Before he met my mother he was brilliant but had no output to prove it. To this day he continues to be extremely productive and his work continues to revolutionize the industry. Take this anecdote as you will.
Bullshit statistics and studies abound everywhere as do misinterpretations of real data. I use my experience and thought for guidance.
Let's say you're a single guy just out of college, working your first job and living in an apartment. When you come home in the evening, you may have a few chores (laundry, make dinner, clean up here and there), but essentially you have a vast window of free time from at least 7:00pm until you go to sleep. That's 3-5 hours of free time TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT. On the weekend, you easily have 6 to 8 hours a day to do whatever you want, with lots of time left over to have fun.
Now let's say you're married. This chips away at the amount of free time, but not too much. Maybe this cuts down your evenings a bit, and you never do anything on Friday, but it's still a lot of time.
Now you have kids. To make a long story short, this takes away most of your evenings and weekends, dropping you from 20-30 free hours a week to a few here and there which you have to plan far ahead for and during which you're most likely going to be very tired. It's hard to want to jump into a creative activity during those few hours.
Also, you likely have a house by this point. Now you have maintenance and mowing and so on to eat up any free hours you may have. The realization hits you that even if you could write the great american novel it would take three years of 1-2 hours per week to finish it.
The article does a pretty crappy job of demonstrating causality.
While the findings may indeed be true that those who are married exhibit a decrease in creative output, the study doesn't say whether or not "Creative men who's creativity is beginning to wane may suddenly get married" --or -- "Consistently creative men are less likely to marry", or in fact as the article suggests: "Marriage decreases creativity".
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I think the mechanism here isn't the oversimplified, neo-Freudian "competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and gain the attention of women." That would imply that only men lose their creative edge when their priorities shift.
A broader look at the subject would show a parallel with a more modern topic: anti-depression medications. There are plenty of examples of highly creative people -- geniuses in their fields -- whose creativity would likely have been quashed if they'd had access to a good Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitor. Poet Emily Dickinson and artist Vincent Van Gogh come to mind, but I'm sure there are many others.
The problem, as I see it, isn't that having a family takes something away from a would-be genius... any more than an appropriate dosage of Prozac does. What both do, ideally, is give the person a sense of contentment, a feeling that things are the way they should be.
Creativity, in the end, often requires adversity to bring it out. Remove the adversity, and the creativity (or "genius") may seem to be extinguished. But as the examples in this discussion show -- Bach, Hawking, et al -- it is possible to achieve both genius and happiness. It just doesn't happen very often.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Having children is not necessarily the same as our modern form of married life (or female/male relationships).
Look at classical Greece. It was quite common for men to have large families with their wives locked at home, engage in sexual relationships with young boys, not to mention have the occasional drunken symposium with lots of prostitutes and wine.
It used to be an accepted fact that women have a negative impact upon masculine creativity and they should be prevented from dominating a man's life and time as much as possible.
I don't know about Frank Lloyd Wright, but Einstein was definitely a philanderer and had many lovers. He didn't let any one woman dominate him or share his home for his entire life. Stephen Hawking, for obvious reasons, was hardly the man a woman would want to spend all her time with.
We don't have any social customs today which attempt to control women's ability to distract men. They flaunt their bodies everywhere with impunity, preventing us from determining when and where we are sexually aroused. Women today expect copious amounts of attention as a normal part of a relationship. Establishments which exclude women are generally illegal, although the same is not true for women (Look at how many Female only gyms are out there).
Anyway, you had a short post.. don't mean it to seem like I am ripping on you, but I think having and desiring children is just as normal for a man as a woman. What is not normal is the modern concept of male/female relationships which has developed since the Victorian era.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Darn. I recently got married, and will probably soon have children :P
Of course, maybe it is just that the creative genius changes to some extent.... Obviously children require a creative attitude towards, so maybe they become the focus of the creative genius instead of things like computers, physics, etc... What do you all think?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Or to turn a different interpretation on this data, once married, a scientist is less likely to be able to spend 15 hours a day in the lab.
Well, this should be a very easy hypothesis to test. Female scientists should show less of a drop after their marriage, since they should be less affected by the "all-important male hormone."
This guy theorizes that testosterone levels drop after marriage, and therefore so does the competitive drive, and therefore one's level of contribution to science. This seems to be a LOT of interpretation to read into a small amount of data.
Besides "Yes dear" and "I'm sorry", don't forget "You were right and I was wrong" and "Please forgive me"
Yes, you'll get creative about how to get the kid to finish the evening crying fit and go down at night, how to get your wife to roll out of bed to change that diaper at 3 AM, how to manage your mental health, how to not despair at how long it will be until you get your freedom back. Yes the joyful part is there too but more than half the time it's just the stressful work of parenting, especially at the begining when it dawns on you that raising children well takes as much or more effort and self-education as your current job.
Raising children doesn't require genuis, it requires endurance.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Of course his wife was like "All I want for my birthday is a Proof" (probably not adding, "so I can start nagging you about taking out the garbage!")
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
This is a textbook case of "RTFA" dispelling the pretense of the introduction.
First, the article actually states that only 25%, a marked MINORITY of said "geniuses," have made their last significant contribution within 5 years of having been married. This is a far cry from the sweeping claim of the introduction.
Second, it's a reasonably well known fact that historically most major thinkers, whether ultimately married or not, have produced their greatest work before the age of 35.
This article is really nothing more than a confirmation of what we've all known for years:
A) that among scientists and their ilk there exists a certain unfortunate subgroup of obsessive/compulsives who simply cannot manage the demands of work and an actual life simultaneously.
B) that at least 25% of slashdot articles, within 5 hours of being posted, will be utterly debunked.
> Obviously children require a creative attitude towards, so maybe they become the focus of the creative genius
No, I don't think so. If your creative genius doesn't normally run toward interpersonal relationships (if so, why are you reading Slashdot?), marriage and kids can be major distractions and energy sinks if not handled properly.
Some suggestions:
0) Hold off getting married. Women will find you more attractive as you get more successful, as long as you stay half-way fit. Either exercise, or stick to a low-carb diet, or both.
1) Pick a dedicated career/professional woman to marry - and yes, you can pick, if you apply your genius to figuring out how to stack the odds in your favor.
2) Apply a bit of your genius to making the money you need for as little effort as possible. Don't cave into fear and take a "9-5" (life-eating) job just to cover expenses. See also (1) above - if you can't afford a housewife, don't marry one.
3) Hire a nanny as soon as you get kids. Schedule generous time with your kids - but schedule more time away from them.
4) Develop the habit of continuously updating a journal or notebook, so you don't lose your train of thought when you do get interrupted - and you will, if you're married with kids.
But seriously, I'm not really surprised at these results. All of the prolific scientists I know were "made" early in their career, OR they ignore their families so much they might as well be considered single.
How the hell did the parent post get modded insightful? The entire post reeks of an attitude that says 'boys should be boys, and girls should be powerless'. The poster seems to regard women as evil succubuses that entrap men through their feminine wiles and sap them of their creativity. I call bullshit. Men have been a far larger burden on women than the other way around.
It used to be an accepted fact that women have a negative impact upon masculine creativity and they should be prevented from dominating a man's life and time as much as possible.
It's an accepted fact that men have a negative impact upon feminine creativity and should be prevented from dominating a woman's life and time as much as possible. The traditional view of marriage sees the wife as housekeeper, mother, cook, caretaker, etc... all roles that ask her to serve others, instead of expressing herself or being creative. Yes, those jobs are important, and involve some creativity - but not in ways that society respets in men, such as writing, research, or art. Why do you think there was a whole movement by women so that being unmarried wouldn't be stigmatized like in the past? Do you think that *maybe* the 'traditional marriage' you refer to is the reason women have made up a minority of artists and scientists?
Hell, you're not even affirming commited relationships - you seem to approve of men "[having] their wives locked at home, engage[ing] in sexual relationships with young boys, not to mention have the occasional drunken symposium with lots of prostitutes and wine." As if drunkenly fucking a young boy makes you more creative, and demanding that one sleep only with a spouse is, like, waaaay too confining, man... free love(for the men), you dig? I won't even get into the fact that you disapprove of women 'flauning their bodies' a few paragraphs later.
The poster reminds me of this exchange from "Dr. Strangelove":
Capt. Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen, tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?
General Ripper: Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
Capt. Mandrake: Hmm.
General Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
Capt. Mandrake: Hmm.
General Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.
Capt. Mandrake: No.
General Ripper: But I... I do deny them my essence.
I have a better suggestion for #3 in your case.
3) Volunteer at the local elementary school twice a year (or less if you don't have THAT much time waste)
That way you can save on the price of the nanny, and leave the child rearing to LOVING parents. I know you probably think this is serious flame-bait, but if you are going to create a human being, then it is YOUR responsibility to raise them. If you don't want that responsibility, don't take it on.
********************
The Fat Man Walks Alone
As the old cliche goes, genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration, so this conclusion is not entirely surprising. Once the genius gets married and has children, suddenly a whole lot of that 95% is devoted elsewhere, and not to the body of work that made that person a "genius" in the first place.
I know that this will be a disappointment to many people , but you don't need to be a genius to make a significant breakthrough in most sciences -though it helps. Most of the people that we regard as scientific geniuses were involved in foundational work in their respective fields. If you analyze the contributions of prominent scientists in mature fields of research you'll notice that they are commonly over thirty. When a field is very young though any useful discovery , hypothesis, or formalism is unprecedented and has the potential of establishing the originator as a 'father' of that field. This doesn't detract from the significance of their contributions , but doesn't mean that they are preternaturally intelligent either. Science is a process designed to reveal useful , testable , and replicable information. If this process required that the applicant be a genius then it would contradict its own premises.
* if you choose to refute this , I challenge you to use examples beyond Physics.
I think it's very sad that you consider you child a time-sink and caring for her a waste of your life. I feel even sadder for your child when she finds out that's how you feel about her.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Hao Wu got moteradted as funny, but I think he is serious!