The Origins of Creativity
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
'An intellectual hero ... A superb celebrator of science in all its manifestations' Ian McEwan
'Darwin's great successor' Jeffrey Sachs
The legendary biologist Edward O. Wilson offers his most philosophically probing work to date
'Creativity is the unique and defining trait of our species; and its ultimate goal, self-understanding,' begins Edward Wilson's sweeping examination of the humanities and their relationship to the sciences. By studying fields as diverse as paleontology, evolutionary biology and neuroscience, Wilson demonstrates that human creativity began not 10,000 years ago, as we have long assumed, but over 100,000 years ago in the Paleolithic Age. Chronicling the evolution of creativity from primates to humans, Wilson shows how the humanities, in large part spurred on by the invention of language, have played a previously unexamined role in defining our species. Exploring a surprising range of creative endeavors - the instinct to create gardens; the use of metaphors and irony in speech; or the power of music and song - Wilson proposes a transformational 'Third Enlightenment' in which the blending of science and the humanities will enable us to gain a deeper understanding of the human condition, and how it ultimately originated.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson (Half-Earth) makes a case for blending an understanding of the sciences into the humanities in his latest work, raising provocative questions in the process. He ponders what sets humans apart from other hominids and what societal factors may be suppressing the humanities as a field of study, but despite his title's promise he only provides brief glimpses of answers to his central question. As Wilson is one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, it is not surprising that he focuses so much on the evolutionary history of our species. "Because the creative arts entail a universal, genetic trait, the answer to the question lies in evolutionary biology," he posits. He argues that the humanities have failed to make enough progress on this front and have lost public support because "they remain largely unaware and uncaring about the evolutionary events of prehistory that created the human mind, which after all created the history on which the humanities focus." He integrates examples largely from literature and the visual arts to analogize cultural innovation to genetic mutation. Wilson concludes by calling for a "third enlightenment" in which the humanities and the sciences draw more heavily on one another but, even as he professes otherwise, he appears to place far more weight on the latter.
