The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley Read Free

success to genetics, or what he called “natural abilities.” For Galton, genetics explained everything. It explained why one family might contain several eminent members and another none. It explained why societies with many immigrants and refugees were often successful, since these newcomers “introduced a valuable strain of blood.” It explained why some nations succeeded morethan others (elucidated in a chapter with the unfortunate title “The Comparative Worth of Races”). It explained the decline of once-great civilizations—the ancient Greeks, for instance, had begun to intermarry with “lesser” peoples, thus diluting their bloodline. In the end, it explained why every one of his geniuses was a white man, like him, living on a small, gloomy island off the coast of continental Europe. As for women, Galton only mentions them once, in a chapter called “Literary Men.”
    Galton’s book was well received, and no wonder. It articulated, in scientific language, what people had suspected for a long time: geniuses are born, not made.
    Subhadra carefully places the pins and felt back into the Galton Box. She confides that she has mixed feelings about the Box, and about Galton, who came from a privileged background yet was blind to the advantages such status bestowed upon him and his friends.
    “He thought he was living in a meritocracy,” she says. Yet, at the same time, she can’t deny that he was brilliant. He was the first to measure things we thought were unmeasurable and, she says, slipping off the gloves, “question things we thought were unquestionable.” Galton single-handedly wrested the subject of creative genius from the hands of the poets and the mystics and placed it squarely in the hands of the scientists.
    His notion of hereditary genius, though, was dead wrong. Genius is not passed down like blue eyes or baldness. There is no genius gene; one genius has yet to beget another. Civilizations do not rise and fall because of shifting gene pools. Yes, when it comes to creative genius, genes are part of the mix, but a relatively small part, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent, psychologists estimate.
    The geniuses-are-born myth has been supplanted by another myth: geniuses are made. On the face of it, this seems true. It takes hard work, at least ten thousand hours of practice, over ten years, to begin to approach mastery, let alone genius, as one well-known study found. Modern psychology has, in other words, unearthed empirical evidence for Edison’s old saw about success being 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.
    This component, sweat, adds another piece to the picture, animportant piece. The picture, though, remains incomplete. Something is missing. But what? That question nags at me, like one of Galton’s mathematical puzzles, as I walk briskly across the Victorian campus, the spring tease replaced by a light but persistent rain.
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    A few months and some seven thousand miles later, I find myself at yet another campus, in the presence of yet another box. This box contains index cards. There must be hundreds of them. On each card, written in tiny but perfectly legible handwriting, is a historic event and the name of an eminent person who lived at the time. The Italian Renaissance and Michelangelo, for instance. The cards are neatly categorized by date and place. It’s all so methodical, so Galtonian, I think. The owner of this box, though, is very much alive and kicking. He is standing before me now, shaking my hand vigorously.
    Dean Keith Simonton is tan and fit. He’s on sabbatical but you wouldn’t know it judging by his boundless energy and frenetic schedule. He’s wearing jeans and flip-flops and, as he does every day, a T-shirt with an illustration of a genius or leader emblazoned on it. (Today, it is Oscar Wilde.) A mountain bike is propped against the bookshelf. Schubert is playing softly in the background. The California sun streams through the window.
    Simonton is a