A Critique of Sociobiology as a 'Rational Superstition'

Prelude: The sociobiological "paradigm" and its consequences

Introduction: The 'biosocial' theory of creativity

An outline of the 'biosocial' theory's premises

1. There is a link between madness and creativity. Everyone knows examples of creative people (Nietzsche, Van Gogh, etc.) who later went crazy, and crazy people who produce amazing creative works as part of their therapy. (Mental health professionals who have realized this often display the artwork of their psychotic patients, which is of profound depth and quality.) Much art (Hieronymous Bosch, surrealism, Dadaism, Edvard Munch, and other parts of the avant-garde) seems to be the work of madmen. This premise has been criticized by Rothenberg and others who believe that creative people are very stable and normal, although they may occasionally use unusual modes of thinking (which he calls 'translogical' rather than 'irrational.') Others propose the deprivation/compensation hypothesis: the 'suffering/starving' artist creates to compensate for his lack and his suffering through the act of creation. While such suffering is usually socioeconomic, it may also be a result of illness, one kind of which could be mental illness. From this point of view, mental illness is only indirectly connected to creative ability; other forms of illness (Beethoven's deafness, Frieda Kahlo's pain, etc.) are impetuses as well.
2. Creativity is a special form of madness. According to the theory, creativity is either a strategy or form of sublimation to deal with madness, or a modified form of madness which is benign. This idea is expressed by C.G. Jung when he tells James Joyce about his sister in a mental asylum: "She has drowned in the same river from which you draw your sustenance." R.D. Laing has often taken an opposite position, which is that madness is merely creativity thwarted by society. From the viewpoint of Laing, Thomas Szasz, and Foucault, "madness" is a label created by society in order to imprison its visionaries. It is "manufactured," often to lock up critics of repressive regimes, because creative people can be dangerous to bureaucratic control.
3. Madness results from neuropathology. The next assumption of the theory is that madness is the result of defective brains: brains which have unusual EEG readings, an unbalanced neurochemistry, abnormal brain structures, or unsual hemisphere lateralization. The critiques of this step in the theory are numerous. It excludes non-biological, that is, social (family/developmental, socioeconomic, etc.) and personal (i.e. life crises, shock, trauma, etc.) factors in the genesis of psychopathology. It also excludes the possibility that the manifestation and progress of madness may be shaped by cultural factors, as well as its recognition and description by the culture in which it occurs. But, as psychology has moved from psychoanalytic to biochemical explanations of disorders, this is not uncharacteristic for the field. Of course, the problem here is also whether madness is really a form of sickness; according to C.G. Jung, it is a declaration of the search for the Self and the beginning of psychic individuation: the role of analyst is as guide, not therapist.
4. Neuropathology is inherited. According to this premise, such abnormal brains are the results of peculiar genes: they are genetically determined and inheritable. Needless to say, multiple critiques are possible here as well. Neuropathology, which is common, can result from all sorts of brain trauma: concussions, infectious diseases, toxins in the environment (such as aluminum, which causes Parkinsons'), and conditions in the womb. Further, all sorts of environmental factors - nutrition, drug use, atrophy - can affect the physiology of the brain. These must be excluded in order to have a purely genetic explanation for neuropathology.

'Scientific' conclusions of the theory

While this theory may seem scientifically untenable, it has been proposed in many quarters recently. One of its best expositions has been in by a prominent neuropsychologist[2]. Timothy Leary has also given lip service to the idea[3] by suggesting that the creative explosion of the 1960s was the product of neurological 'mutants,' although he leans toward pointing to environmental (LSD- taking) factors as creating the needed modifications. Some sociobiologists (including E.O. Wilson) have begun looking for evolutionary bases for creativity as a trait promoted by natural selection: creative thinkers, after all, can devise crafty ways out of the climate and resource shifts that wipe out their co-species competitors. As these evolutionists have pointed out, the 'defects' of creative peoples' brains need not be disadvantageous: every mutation starts out as an apparent defect, until it becomes an advantage. Those working within this point of view have looked at brains ranging from Einstein's to Lenin's to Virginia Woolf's to see if there are physiological differences. Others, working on sociobiological theories of creativity, have asked, "Why are there so few creative geniuses if such a trait does so much to advance the human race?" Some of these sociobiologists suggest that the human race can only withstand a limited amount of change or innovation, and for that reason genius may be selected against , so as to be relatively infrequent[4].

Historical aspects of the theory

In the 20th century, many of the luminaries of the medical and psychiatric fields continued to see genius as a pathology. Some advocates of the hypothesis included Havelock Ellis, Arthur Jacobson, Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, and Radaslav A. Tanoff. The majority of these researchers also saw it as a hereditable physiological condition. After 1949, perhaps due to the overall decline of eugenic-type thinking after World War II, much of the research in this vein disappeared from medical journals. The amazing thing is that it has made a comeback in the 1980s, under the guise of what I have been calling the "biosocial theory of creativity." Around 1984, it first starts being called that, perhaps to eliminate the mention of sickness or heredity on the part of people doing research in the field.

Sociologists who have looked at this phenomenon have been surprised. One author[6] declared in 1978 that the "labelling program" of declaring geniuses to be mentally unhealthy had stopped in the 1950s. (He feels that this is in part due to changing societal attitudes toward originality and innovation.) Despite Becker's perceived moratorium, there have recently been a whole series of articles to look at genius as an inheritable psychopathology. Prentsky mentions several studies noting that geniuses tend to have families with large numbers of "schizoid" members or others with "chronic schizoid-like behavior." Further, he mentions psychological studies of various geniuses - including composers (such as Beethoven, Mozart, etc.), scientists (including Faraday and Newton), and writers (such as Strindberg and Baudelaire) - and notes that many of these studies claim these figures had experienced either full-blown chronic schizophrenia or schizophrenic-like symptoms such as auditory hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, self-destructive behavior, autism, and "personality dissociation". A host of others were said to suffer from neurosis, 'character disorders', manic-depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, 'hypersensitivity', martyr/persecution complexes, 'labile affect', megalomania, and sexual dysfunction. Nisbet in 1912 linked the pathology of genius with 40 other symptomatic conditions, including apoplexy, gout, rheumatism, and scrofula![7]

Becker notes that there are several types of polemics in the "Mad Genius" literature of 1850-1950. These polemics fall into a few basic types:

1. Genius as disequilibrium. Something about geniuses is out of balance, or they have some hyperdeveloped faculty which results in other faculties, such as affect, being weakened.
2. Genius as degeneracy. Max Nordau and others claim the degenerate is evolutionarily regressive, a 'throwback', with identifiably primitive somatic and cognitive attributes. The genius belongs to the same class of 'degenerates' as anarchists, prostitutes, criminals, and lunatics.
3. Genius as "neurasthenic" condition. Under this model, geniuses overwork themselves, and are subject to nervous exhaustion from the continual tensions they subject themselves to.
4. Genius as the product of genetic conflict. This model sees genius as a necessary result of 'hybridization' and the 'genetic conflict' that results from it.

Ways the theory differs from its antecedents

Physiological predictions of the theory

Those who lean even more toward more "demonstrable" explanations look for abnormal neurological structures. Prentsky mentions lesions of the amygdala and the hippocampus as causing defects in nervous system responsivity, and points to evidence suggesting such lesions can be found in many geniuses' brains. Prentsky theorizes that, like neurotransmitter deficiencies which cause schizophrenic conditions, such neurological defects may be genetically determined. Prentsky notes that most geniuses fall into the population range of individuals with "C-Type" physiologies: higher incidence of electrodermal skin-conductance fluctuations, increased levels of ACTH and adrenal cortical steroids, and higher digital skin temperature. Such "C-type" individuals have an 'overactive' nervous system which does not effectively filter out "noise" taken in from the environment, and exhausts itself as a result, says Prentsky. They have low distractibility, strong attentional focus, high input registration, and high responsiveness, says Prentsky; as far as psychological personality types, they tend to be introverted, withdrawn, and moody.

Some other neurophysiologists writing in this vein have described geniuses as having weak inhibitory processes: in other words, the neuronal activity of inhibition is limited and therefore they are less able to "hold back" their crazy ideas and notions. The normal "filter" of our brains which keeps it from being overloaded from stimuli or lost in internal thought processes is said to be weakened from this lack of inhibitory mechanisms[8]. Deficiencies of dopaminergic neurotransmitters are said to play a role in this condition. Unfortunately for them, the biochemical mechanisms of neurotransmitter production and reuptake are poorly understood, and people working in this area are very far from making genetic explanations of the mechanisms involved in the process.

Social aspects of the theory

Of course, there are models of genius which suggest that it is not an innate or inherent quality, and that it is just a label which society selectively applies according to exclusionary, culturally-derived criteria. People are said to be "geniuses" because they say things which people want to hear. Under this model of genius, the supposed rarity of genius is to provide an ideological guarantee for the power of knowledge elites or experts. The interesting thing about biological models of genius are that they treat it as a fixed, measurable quantity - present only in a few people, and some of those people have greater shares than others - and ignore the possibility that it may be a conferred title rather than a recognition of ability. The fact is that the term genius itself changes in history: in the Renaissance, men of genius were noted for their adherence to the imitiatio-ideal (they were able to imitate other works of art with great accuracy) whereas in the Enlightenment the notion of genius came to refer more to rational ability. Following the Enlightenment - in the Romantic period especially - genius came to be focused on originality, irrationality, and transgressiveness. It is during the Romantic period, not unsurprisingly, that people begin to most strongly associate genius with madness. However, as Becker notes, when the social norms regarding innovation in the West change, the aspects of genius that seemed crazy are now perceived as less threatening.

Due to the "medicalization" of madness as a neurological/biochemical deficit, and the increased dependence of psychiatry on seeing mental illnesses as congenital disorders, it is not unsurprising that genius, so associated with madness in popular culture, would come to be seen as a form of inheritable neuropathology just like schizophrenia is. Part of the whole "mad genius" question gets into the realm of social norms, and how the abnormal comes to be seen as unhealthy (hence, treatable, or, more bluntly, eradicable.) We know that genius, like craziness, is an unusual condition, and somewhat unfamiliar to people, but it is another step to come to see it as a pathology, and a further step to see it as an inherent biological trait. Part of the problem is also that our notions of madness, as Michel Foucault notes, have undergone transformation[10]. Madness was seen as a form of social benefit, once: no one would dare lock up the "holy fools" because they were seen as being "touched" by supernatural agencies. Today, society sees madness as threatening and dangerous, and anybody who seems crazy needs to be locked up. For Aquinas, or even Schopenhauer, to claim that genius was a form of madness did not diminish the respect of people for the power of geniuses, because madness was not seen as socially destructive.

The fact that there are many types of creativity - artistic, scientific, literary, dramatic, musical, etc. - makes it seem unlikely that there is any one inherent trait that confers ability in each area. Even if there was one trait we could call "creativity," there is no one 'genius gene' to which we can attach its hereditary transmission. The 'biosocial theorists' of creativity suppose that there is a certain predisposition in certain people to think abnormally (in nonlinear or alogical ways), and that this predisposition is genetic in nature. In some people, this biological abnormality results in inability to deal with reality and results in madness; in others, it produces talent or genius. Rather than looking at individual life changes and social processes that might be the source of this ability to transform a disability into a gift, the 'biosocial theorists' look exclusively for biological causes. Perhaps the gene is 'muted' by other factors such as input from the environment. They do not explore at all the developmental reinforcements, for example, that might help to stimulate genius, etc.

Conclusions

What the 'biosocial theory' of creativity represents, then, is a rationalization of an old superstition, in many ways. It is an attempt to portray a very old idea, in modern, scientific-sounding language. What is very new about it is that it grounds creativity in biological terms: it is innate, inherent, and inescapable. The social factors in the genesis, reception, and evaluation of genius are ignored. The idea that genius is inheritable is another 'modernization' of a folk belief, that creativity runs in families and reappears in intermittent generations. The "biosocial theory" of creativity, like many sociobiological theories, takes a few generalizations and apparent similarities and turns them into a seemingly scientific theory, based on anecdotal evidence and 'just-so' thinking. While madness and creativity seem similar at times - maybe even manifest similar types of behavior - it is not clear that they are the same condition or even divergent facets of one condition. There are many geniuses that are quite stable and normal, and many erratic people that never undertake any monumental or original projects. The lesson one might learn from the processes of rationalization behind the theory are important, for many of the most 'rational' ideas of any age are really just 'rationalized' beliefs from an earlier epoch.

Footnotes

1. Hollandsworth, James G., Jr. The Physiology of Psychological Disorders. , p. 18
2. Prentsky, Robert A. Creativity and Psychopathology: A Neurocognitive Approach.
3. Leary, Timothy. Neuropolitique.
4. Karlsson, J.L. The Inheritance of Creative Intelligence. , p. 37
5. See Galton's book, Hereditary Genius: Its Laws and Consequences.
6. Becker, George A. The Mad Genius Controversy: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance.
7. Nisbet, J.F. The Insanity of Genius, and the General Inequality of Human Faculty, Physiologically Considered.
8. Cooper, J.R., Bloom, F.E., and Roth, R.H. The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharmacology and Psychology., p. 172
9. See in this vein Szasz, Thomas. The Myth of Mental Illness.
10. See Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: The Birth of the Asylum.