Thursday, July 05, 2007

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature: Not True

Psychology Today has a list of ten "politically incorrect truths about human nature." This caught my eye:
7. What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals

For nearly a quarter of a century, criminologists have known about the "age-crime curve." In every society at all historical times, the tendency to commit crimes and other risk-taking behavior rapidly increases in early adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood, rapidly decreases throughout the 20s and 30s, and levels off in middle age.

This curve is not limited to crime. The same age profile characterizes every quantifiable human behavior that is public (i.e., perceived by many potential mates) and costly (i.e., not affordable by all sexual competitors). The relationship between age and productivity among male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, and male scientists—which might be called the "age-genius curve"—is essentially the same as the age-crime curve. Their productivity—the expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then equally quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.

...A single theory can explain the productivity of both creative geniuses and criminals over the life course: Both crime and genius are expressions of young men's competitive desires, whose ultimate function in the ancestral environment would have been to increase reproductive success.

That my be true about creativity in general, but I don't think it really applies to true geniuses, especially Advanced ones. I would be interested in hearing what their definition of "creative genius"is because genius comes in so many forms. For instance, I happen to believe in a sort of genius that is ageless and a looks a bit like this: long hair in the back, black sunglasses, black leather jacket.

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