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."
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.
It's just that most (ordinary) women aren't really much for issues bigger than the Cable Bill and What Emmy Said To Susan About Dana's Relationship With Kevin and so on.
I disinclude geek women here - you ladies are a breed apart and I salute you.
Just try thinking about a Grand Unified Theory when someone is whining at you about how you forgot to clean out the f***ing cat box again.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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
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
"A man is not complete until he's married...
Then, he's finished."
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.
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.
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 think he has it all backwards. If you get married you can nolonger be considered a genious.
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.
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.
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...
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