Creativity (35 page)

Sooner or later, each of them also became part of the field of literature. They befriended older writers, they gravitated to avant-garde schools and journals, they became intensely involved with other young writers. Eventually they became the gatekeepers by teaching literature and serving on juries, editorial boards, and so on. As opposed to the generally ecstatic relation they had with dead writers, relations with live ones were much more problematic. Domin regrets the infighting of the literary “mafia”; Stern is aware of the potential for bitter jealousy among peers. Somehow or other, however,
writers must come to terms with the social organization of their domain if their voices are to be heard.

Another similarity among the writers was the oft-stressed emphasis on the dialectic between the irrational and the rational aspects of the craft, between passion and discipline. Whether we want to call it the Freudian unconscious where childhood repressions linger or the Jungian collective unconscious where the archetypes of the race dwell, or whether we think of it as a space below the threshold of awareness where previous impressions randomly combine until a striking new connection happens by chance, it is quite clear that all the writers place great stock in the sudden voice tha
t arises in the middle of the night to enjoin: “You have to write this.”

Everyone agrees that necessary as it is to listen to the unconscious, it is not sufficient. The real work begins when the emotion or idea that sprang from the uncharted regions of the psyche is held up to the light of reason, there to be named, classified, puzzled over, and related to other emotions and ideas. It is here that craft comes into play: The writer draws on a huge repertoire of words, expressions, and images used by previous writers, selects the ones most fitting to the present task, and knows how to make up new ones when needed.

To do so it helps to have a broad base of knowledge that extends beyond the boundaries of literature. Domin draws on her knowledge of many languages; Hecht on music and geometry; L’Engle on quantum physics and microbiology. Being able to braid together ideas and emotions from disparate domains is one way writers express their creativity. Love and death may not have changed for thousands of years; but the way we understand them changes each generation, in part as a result of what we know about other facets of life.

There were many similarities also in the methods these writers follow as they ply their craft. All of them keep notebooks handy for when the voice of the Muse calls, which tends to be early in the morning while the writer is still in bed, half asleep. Most of them have been keeping diaries for many years. They usually start a working day with a word, a phrase, or an image, rather than a concept or planned composition. The work evolves on its own rather than the author’s intentions, but is always monitored by the critical eye of the writer. What is so difficult about this proc
ess is that one must keep the mind focused on two contradictory goals: not to miss the message whispered by the unconscious and at the same time force it into a suitable form. The first requires openness, the second critical judg
ment. If these two processes are not kept in a constantly shifting balance, the flow of writing dries up. After a few hours the tremendous concentration required for this balancing act becomes so exhausting that the writer has to change gears and focus on something else, something mundane. But while it lasts, creative writing is the next best thing to having a world of one’s own in which what’s wrong with the “real” world can be set right.

W
e do not know for sure what was the first form of systematic knowledge our ancestors developed. Certainly the attempt to classify plants and animals, to understand health and disease, must have been one of the earliest. The domain that we now call biology, dealing with the forms and processes of life, is one of the fundamental ways humans have tried to make sense of the world in which they lived.

The difference between present knowledge and the knowledge of our ancestors is greater in biology than in any domain except physics. More than four thousand years ago, in all the major centers of civilization—Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China—knowledge of medicinal herbs and animal species that had been slowly assembled by preliterate hunters and pastoralists began to be carefully recorded. Fifteen hundred years later Aristotle provided a more scientific classification of animals, and one of his students did the same for plants. But until the last few centuries nobody had
any understanding of physiological processes—digestion, breathing, the circulation of blood, the function of the nervous system. No idea of cells, of bacteria and viruses, of genetics and evolution. The difference between
what our ancestors could see of the processes of life and what we can see is enormous.

The life sciences now have become so diversified and specialized that we would need several dozen examples to show what the domain consists of. Even a little over a hundred years ago, someone like the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt could condense in four volumes the entire spectrum of knowledge that a biologist or earth scientist was then likely to know. Nowadays no single individual can be expected to cover in depth even a small fraction of the content of the discipline. This chapter focuses on three persons who have changed the domain of the life sciences,
even though these three case studies represent only a few of the many possible approaches.

A P
ASSION FOR
O
RDER

E. O. Wilson is one of the most influential biologists of our time. With more than three hundred technical papers and many books, two of which have won the Pulitzer Prize, he has made important contributions to the classification of ants; to the concept of biodiversity, or the necessity to preserve the variety of life forms; to the study of chemical communication in insects; and to the study of island ecosystems. But he is probably best known as the father of sociobiology, or the ongoing attempt to explain human behavior and social institutions in terms of their selective value ove
r evolutionary time. In the process, he has become involved in deep ideological disagreements that at one point generated a host of enemies both within the field and outside of it. Regardless of fame or adversity, however, Wilson keeps true to his vocation, which is an unusual combination of rigorous fieldwork with inspired insights that bring together facts and principles everyone else thought were unrelated.

His current goal is to achieve the grand synthesis of the social and biological sciences that he initiated with the classic work
Sociobiology
:

A Naturalist with Steely Ambition

Wilson has been a ceaseless worker all his life. A painful childhood instilled a certain amount of insecurity in him, which he decided to overcome with a relentless drive modeled on an idealized Southern heritage long on pride, sacrifice, and discipline. These were what current psychological jargon calls deficit motives, based on efforts to compensate for undesirable early experiences. But there was also positive motivation: fascination with and love for the living world, and especially for some of its most humble denizens, ants and termites. Wilson wanted to be an entomologist by
age ten; some issues of the
National Geographic
and a visit with a friend to the Washington Zoo confirmed that what he wanted most to do in life was to become an explorer and a naturalist.

Like many creative individuals, Wilson was bored in school until he reached college. In the early years, the Boy Scouts provided an environment where he could pursue his own interests and learn at his own speed. One would have thought that Wilson, having impaired vision, would become interested in whales or elephants, but with characteristic obstinacy he chose to focus on the smallest of insects instead. At the age of thirteen, he wrote up the first reports on the mound-nests of the fire ants that were beginning to infiltrate the Southern states, creating a sizable environmental pr
oblem. When he was in high school in Mobile, Alabama, a local news editor decided to feature the fire ants and commissioned the young Wilson to write a series of articles. The sudden responsibility, acceptance, and feeling of accomplishment this project provided launched his career.

At about the same age, before entering college, Wilson read Ernst Mayr’s
Systematics and the Origins of Species
, which revealed to him that the huge mass of facts in the natural world could be ordered in a meaningful way by adopting the theory of natural selection. Mayr was the first great intellectual influence on Wilson’s career; later he
became mentor and then valued colleague to the younger naturalist. But many other influences followed, as Wilson retained his youthful curiosity and openness. “I just had one road to Damascus after another, I guess,” he says of his intellectual journey. Signposts on that road included the example of James Watson, whose grand reduction of genetics to the double helix of the chromosome and whose boldness and independence he found very appealing. Konrad Lorenz taught him the possibility of explaining animal behavior through ethological observations; the geographer Ellsworth Huntington was resp
onsible for introducing the concepts of evolutionary ecology, which tried to explain why two cultures developing in very similar ecological niches, such as Newfoundland and Iceland, end up being so different. Finally he learned about the principles of kin selection from William D. Hamilton, whose mathematical models of changes in the reproductive rates of populations opened up another door for understanding life processes. From all these very different perspectives, Wilson was about to forge his own great synthesis.

His personal development appears to have been as complex as the intellectual one. We saw in chapter 3 that creative individuals typically alternate between opposite poles on traits that are usually segregated. Wilson mentions several of these polarities—facility vs. persistence, love of subject matter vs. desire to control, selflessness vs. ambition, solitude vs. social acceptance, enjoyment vs. pain—in these reflections about what it takes to be a successful scientist:

Dodging Bullets

In his own life, Wilson often had to tolerate rivals and rejection. This was due, in part, to a convergence of historical circumstances in the domain and the field of biology in the 1960s that changed the rules of the discipline beyond recognition.

In terms of the domain, it was in that period that knowledge in molecular biology suddenly went through a phase of exponential growth. The naturalist tradition of field work in which Wilson had been trained suddenly looked old and pointless. The great leaders of a former generation were being eclipsed by young experimentalists
who could control the chemical processes within cells, decode genetic instructions, and promise to unlock the secrets of biological creation itself. To paraphrase Karl Marx, the point of biology shifted from studying life to actually changing it.

The effect of this revolution in knowledge was that most bright biologists were attracted to its molecular variety, threatening to leave the old guard high and dry, deprived of the necessary recruits. The change in the domain had an immediate impact on the field: Research grants started to go to the laboratories, journals began to publish more experimental articles and fewer fieldwork studies, and the new generation of biologists turned away from the old problems and immersed itself in the seemingly endless but orderly world of cellular processes. In other words, an extreme example
of what Thomas Kuhn has called a paradigm shift was sweeping through biology.

In such a situation the most common response for members of the old guard is to resign themselves to the inevitability of “progress,” take on an administrative position, or rest on their laurels in some other fashion. But Wilson was still too young, or too determined, to throw in the towel. So he developed a strategy for thwarting historical inevitability that ultimately proved quite successful. He did not try to confront the molecular revolution head-on, or deny its contributions. Instead, by bringing together other current approaches such as mathematical modeling and population studies he wa
s able to resurrect Darwinian natural history in a modern guise. Wilson explains how he pursued his campaign to defend his hold on the domain, and therefore on the field of biology:

As Wilson suggests, in order to make a viable creative contribution one must change both the symbolic system and the social system at the same time. It is not enough to come up with new ideas, new facts, new laws. One also must convince young people that they will be able to make a living and a name for themselves by adopting the new perspective.

But the field of biology in the 1960s was being changed by forces other than the molecular revolution, forces that originated outside the domain of biology in the larger sociocultural arena. What biologists did began to be a concern of society at large. Evolutionary theory, with its axiom of the “survival of the fittest,” was seen as providing ideological support to entrenched powers. Molecular genetics was raising the specter of scientists deciding what kind of children we should have, and how many. Battle lines were drawn along political lines, and Wilson’s effort to achieve a socio
biological synthesis found itself in the cross fire. In these often quite violent confrontations, his early pride and spirit of adventure stood him in good stead: