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."
Aw cripes. NO WONDER I'm feeling dragged by the lagging economy and wishy-washy business recently.
... I'm screwed?
It must have NOTHING to do with the fact that I'm now in my early 30's and married just over one year now. So, basically
At least I won't knock over the 7-11 on whim while out on my midnight smoke run. Oh, wait, pussy whipped...Quitting.
Damn it Spock, we need more testosterone.
And crime. The linked article says this happens to genus and crime in young men. Why leave that off the article? Only 10% of Slashdot readers ever read the articles, so leaving that key piece of information off is a little irresponsible, since we know the reader's habits now.
Of course, I don't know why the average Slashdot reader would need to know either fact.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Two words sum it all up....
"yes dear...."
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.
I'm thinking this is just to make slashdotters able to justify their position with the opposite sex.
Stupidity is hereditary...your kids give it to you.
:)
The marriage part...well, I'll let her explain it.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
That is why I worry about accepting a bride. What will it do to my studies? How could a woman help my research, or compile data for me? I am very torn both ways.
I suggest you read Slashdot
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
Scientific support for my choice of the bachelor lifestyle. And I thought I was just being selfish.
This is a problem most /. readers will never have to deal with.
So it is a good thing to be a virgin.
Time to go back to the high school jocks and teach 'em who was right afterall.
They thought I couldn't get sex.... I was simply trying to maintain my genius.
The Political Programmer
To quote Victor Hugo the morning after sleeping with his mistress:
"France lost a great novel last night."
There is a food that has been proven to all but eliminate a woman's sex drive.
:D
It's called "wedding cake."
bah-dum..*ching*
Spouses, rug rats and home ownership are all serious destractions. This is why I feel real hackers should be castrated to avoid them. There is historical precedent (i.e. the operatic castrato).
You might think being an unwashed dedicated geek is enough to repel the opposite sex, but we all know plenty of counter examples. Nope. Castration is the only way to demonstrate that you are a dedicate uber geek.
You first.
Does this mean there's been a rash of marriages in Washington?
It did not take long to come up with a glaring exception: a man recognized as one of the top few composers of all time:
"Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was the most prolific of the great composers. In his 65 years he produced 1,200 musical works and 20 children. You can find his compositions listed in an encyclopedia."
(For the mathematically minded, that's 60 musical works per child. Isn't P.D.Q. #21 ?)
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It means that our brilliant technical minds will continue being brilliant, since the overwhelming majority are in no danger of becoming married.
Insert witty, contrived comment here.
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!"
Don't you think that after fighting for the attention of women, the "scientist" would go ahead and concentrate on other stuff: his scientific career? You know with one thing out of the way, even lesser mortals like us pay attention to other issues.
Just a thought. I wonder what happens to women scientists when they get married!
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?
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.
No wonder women are so under-represented in scientific fields. Who has time to be a creative genius when you've got to take care of a husband all day?
MAN: "Honey, where's the cereal?"
WOMAN: "On the same shelf it always is, dear."
MAN: "Sweetheart, where did you put my shirts?"
WOMAN: "In the same drawer they always are."
Get married and you have one kid before you pop any out of your uterus.
But to be honest I think that if you find yourself in a loving relationship that withstands the test of time, and you have the insight to realise that the ultimate creative activity is raising a child anyway, choosing a life of solitude to work on a physics problem or write an operating system is pathetic.
Remember, Linus has a wife and kids. Even he knows where it's at.
It says that Einstein was married in 1903. Then in 1905, he published three papers, including his most famous one on the theory of relativity. So, the authors of the article used a quote from a man whose life contradicts the theory!
All this study shows is that marriage is associated with a decline in scientific productivity, not that it's the cause. The causation could easily work the other way: once scientists are done making their major contributions, they're more likely to settle down, get married, and focus on family life.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
He has some cute kids and is turning out kernels like a mad man.
Everything Zen;
Everything Zen;
I don't think so!!!
Stephen Hawking? Hard to top his mind among living scientists. 3 children for him.
Einstein? Two sons there.
Frank Lloyd Wright? World's greatest architect (he said so himself, and not many argue with it). 6 children (or was it 7?)
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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
No, you still have a great chance to blather on about aliens and write crappy coffee table books and start a four-letter agency that doesn't accomplish a damned thing in 20 years. Don't sell yourself short. ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Madam Curie is also another exception to this rule. She and her husband both made significant contributions to science after they were married.
I think it depends on who you marry mostly - in Madam Curie's case - her husband Pierre was a helpmate. And anyways - the article states that most scientists drop out at 30 or after 5 years (of marriage). Well - if most people get married about 24 (assumming Geeks marry late) or so - 5 years later they're 30.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
This just in from CES 2004:
DiaperGene (a small company created by former scientists that married and had children) today introduced AutoWipe. Much like the 'autowash' process we all loved in "The Fifth Element", AutoWipe simply bolts onto most cribs for infants and toddlers. The AutoWipe uses backscatter x-ray technology to detect when a #1 or #2 enters any standard diaper, and proceeds to automatically change and dispose of the diaper. A built in incinerator module disposes of the used diaper, and is powered off standard LP portable tanks manufactured by Coleman or etc.. Additionally customers can purchase a module that uses a wireless connection to e-mail or page the parent when the diaper supply is low. All this without harm to your children, and without that eye-opening smell.
Parents everywhere delight!
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.
"So - all the Simpson women turn out okay?"
"That's right, sweetie. The defective 'Simpson Gene' is on the Y chromosome, so only men are affected."
"So I'm not doomed! Oh, Dad, I've never been so glad to be your daughter!"
"A man is not complete until he's married...
Then, he's finished."
I suppose that Andrew Wiles, having a wife and kids, is an exception.
You know, the same Andrew Wiles that proved Fermat's last theorem (a^n + b^n != c^n, n > 2, n is an integer) using some mathematics so advanced maybe 10 people in the world understand it (do NOT check that number).
I guess you have to admire his wife for saying (paraphrasing), "Get in your office...I don't want to see you until you've solved this".
Cheers to the genius and the support of his spouse!!
One thing I've noticed over the years: Women want a man to BE successful, but they often don't want to be married to a man who's doing the necessary work to become successful.
(There's a similar thing with cars: If you're single, having a cool sports-car will help you attract women. Once you've married, she'll want you to trade it in for something more 'practical'.)
...that Linux got hooked nicely into the server but tailed off on the desktop.
Curse you Linus! Divorce her for the freedom of mankind!
What happens when they get divorced?
she gets the house.
you get to be a genius again!
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
"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.
Could you be a genius if you heard the following:
"Albert, get this chalk board out of the living room, NOW!"
"Johan Sebastian Bach stop that infernal racket this instant!"
"Rene! Cartesian my ass, help me with the laundry!"
I mean genius has it's limits.
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.
Leonhard Euler was married and had fourteen children. He was also stone blind for the last 17 years of his life. Despite this he made tremendous and lasting contributions to the field of mathematics.
One biography says of him:
"He was blind for the last 17 years of his life, and during that time his mathematical productivity actually increased. It was said that Euler had tremendous powers of concentration and that he was even able to do mathematics 'with a baby in his lap while the older children played all about him.'"
If the trend is that people become less creative after they marry, it is likely due to a lack of time rather than any suppresion of the creative instinct.
If the study had concentrated on people for whom creativity was essential to their livelihood I doubt there'd be a correlation between creativity and being married. Many artists and writers are married and still turn out works of genius. Some don't even become famous for their works until long after they're married, for example J.K. Rowlings (a woman, I know, and whether or not you like Harry Potter it is a great work), and Stephen King(one of the most prolific writers of our time).
I always wondered why my friends who married became dull and unentertaining almost overnight. Once, while on my death bed with a horrible flu, a recently-married friend called to regail me with his tale of putting plastic up on his second-floor condo windows. Man, til then I hadn't had so much fun--NOT!
I have yet to see a friend become MORE interesting after marriage, or even manage to tread water and remain a good ol' guy.
And now, a study supports my theory. Of course, I am still waiting eagerly for some chickie to come along and make ME a bore...
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
I think he has it all backwards. If you get married you can nolonger be considered a genious.
Every married person I know is having regular to semi-regular sex. However, only one of them are actually with their marriage partner still. The rest are separated. So, sure, married people may be having more sex than us singles, but in my experience, it's not with who you may think it is.
bachelor for life
Once they are married... well, what's the point?
What great brainstorm you going to tell us next? Women tend to gain weight after they get married?
Ok, you loose your genius side. You're no longer special. But hey, there's pretty good side, like watching old "America's Funniest Home Video" re-runs, and suddenly realize that Bob Saget is a heck of a comic genius.
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.
Creative genius and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says.
So do geniuses and criminals get married when they are ready to settle down and fit into society? Or does marriage tame them?
Will we have alternate sentences? The judge says, "You have one year to get married or you will live in jail for the next 10 years?"
Will Bill Gates set up a free matchmaking service for geniuses who are innovating in the computer field? Maybe he'll pay for pretty women to go after them?
It could be a fun experiment (speaking as a single genius who is currently designing the next revolution in information technology.)
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Just because you're not married does not mean you are a creative genius. So you have nothing to lose.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Can I get my genius back if I get a divorce?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
But the way she says "We don't have money for you to try to blow yourself up" is so cute...
I could go on...but that seems kinda silly to do...
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.
yeah, and 10 months ago, I went out with my wife, ate some spicy food, drank some red wine, came home and feeling slighty spritzy, got creative with her. Nine months and 4 days later, a little person looking just like me entered the world and I haven't had a full nights sleep since. :)
Now that's what I call genius...
Old JPL humor:
Every engineer should have both a wife and a mistress.
You tell your wife you're spending the night with your mistress, and your mistress you're spending the night with your wife...
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.
You can either be a great person or a great parent, but not both. The two are mutually exclusive.
Lots of great people have tried to be parents. What happened? They ended up being "distant", "unknowable" (i.e., shitty) parents becuase they were spending no time with their kids. After all, they couldn't afford to spend any time with their kids -- all of their precious time was spent doing things that made them into a great person.
And what is the primary requisite for being a great parent? Spending time with your children! It doesn't have to be some exalted kind of "quality time", just spend time with them! Even watching television with your child is infinitely better than spending no time with your child.
So if you have the desire to be a great person, give up on the idea of having children. You will end up doing a disservice to them.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
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.
Note that the article is talking about scientific discoveries. How do we usually measure scientific discoveries? It's different for science than for most other types of creativity. We measure the importance of a scientific 'contribution' by how much of the old way of thinking it over-throws and/or replaces. E.G. Einstein's relativity vs. Newtonian physics.
:) But it's not essential to the definition of a great work of art that it destroys/discredits some other work of art.
:) -- not make new breakthroughs.
Artists don't necessarily have to win their way to the top of the heap and 'discredit' other artists in order to be considered great artists. Not that many of them don't try to destroy/discredit others... Artists are often driven by testosterone, too.
So, you're a young scientist and you make a 'big break through' in some technical field like physics or biology. It destroys some old school of thought and puts hundreds or thousands of other scientists into 'catchup' mode to understand what you've done. You get accolades, and job offers at important universities/research labs. You start raking in the cash and enjoying your status. What next? Hmm, time to get married and have kids. You'll have a much better choice of mates than you would have before the 'big breakthrough' thanks to your new status.
Now you're successful and all that. You could try to investigate your own theory and see if there's anything new to learn. But now you are the 'established school of thought'... why discredit your own work? It's gotten you all these perks! And besides, you've got all these colleagues now who like your theory. If you try to change it you could end up in conflict with many of them, and endanger your status! See the disincentive to break the mold and make any more 'great discoveries' in science once you've arrived? You'll have strong incentives to maintain your theory and build on it, even if it's only 'wrong in a different way than the old one'
It's not that getting married and having kids ruins genius. It's that geniuses who want to relax and enjoy life get married and have kids.
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!