Creativity determines sexual success

[Agrippa]

Older Thread from Skadi of some interest, I think it wasnt posted here so far and the inspiration to post it now was coming from this thread:

Originally Posted by Frans_Jozef

Creativity determines sexual success, research suggests
The more creative a person is, the more sexual partners they are likely to have, according to a pioneering study which could explain the behaviour of notorious womanisers such as poets Lord Byron and Dylan Thomas. The research, by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Open University in the UK, found that professional artists and poets have around twice as many sexual partners as those who do not indulge in these creative activities.

The authors also delved into the personalities of artists and poets and found they shared certain traits with mentally ill patients. These traits were linked with an increased sexual activity and are thought to have evolved because they contribute to the survival of the human species.

Some 425 British men and women, including a sample of visual artists and poets and schizophrenic patients, were surveyed for the report, which is published today in the academic journal, The Proceedings of the Royal Society (B). Although creative types have long been associated with increased sexual activity, this the first time that this link has been proved by research.
Study participants filled in questionnaires which asked about their degree of creative activity in poetry and visual art, their psychiatric history, and their history of sexual encounters since the age of 18. They were also required to answer questions on a 'schizotypy inventory', a breakdown of characteristics linked with schizophrenic patients.

The average number of sexual partners for professional artists and poets was between four and ten, compared with a mean of three for non-creative types. Statistics also showed the average number of sexual partners rose in line with an increase in the amount of creative activity a person took part in.

The lead author of the study, Dr Daniel Nettle, lecturer in psychology with Newcastle University's School of Biology, suggested two key reasons for the findings. He said: "Creative people are often considered to be very attractive and get lots of attention as a result. They tend to be charismatic and produce art and poetry that grabs people's interest.

"It could also be that very creative types lead a bohemian lifestyle and tend to act on more sexual impulses and opportunities, often purely for experience's sake, than the average person would. Moreover, it's common to find that this sexual behaviour is tolerated in creative people. Partners, even long-term ones, are less likely to expect loyalty and fidelity from them."
Dr Nettle added that the results suggested an evolutionary reason for why certain personality traits that serious artists and poets were found to share with schizophrenic patients perpetuated in society.
He added: "These personality traits can manifest themselves in negative ways, in that a person with them is likely to be prone to the shadows of full-blown mental illness such as depression and suicidal thoughts. This research shows there are positive reasons, such as their role in mate attraction and species survival, for why these characteristics are still around."

Yet although some 'schizotypal' traits are linked with high numbers of partners, schizophrenic patients do not experience this level of sexual activity. Dr Nettle said these people tend to suffer from acute social withdrawal and emotional flatness - characteristics that the researchers found were linked with a reduced number of sexual partners.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-cds112805.php

Some artists are histrionic personalities and for many others we could argue about compensation too. I remember a sociobiological theory stating that arts are finally just a specific method to impress other people, raising status and finally having more sexual success. If looking at some modern artists, which are really not technically perfect that often, but rather creative in a wild way and quite good presenters, both of their art and themselves, at least for a certain audience, we see their direct approach towards higher prestige.

Many creative people are borderline schizothyme-schizoid, partly even schizoid-schizophrenic. Whats typical for them is, that unlike typical schizothymes, they are very unrestrained and tend to simply live out certain aspects of their emotional world. They just have no strong control over their strong emotional world unlike the more typical schizothymes, which might be another reason for their higher creativity. Other than that they follow a similar path like other more intelligent schizothymes, trying to impress others with genius, eloquence, abilities, achievements, formal behaviour, partly appearance too rather than with cordiality, openness or simple humor like zyklothymes.

I'd suggest that more artists are schizothymes-schizoids which are no longer able to control their creative and emotional powers, so borderline pathological more often. But they compensate this in their social life with their art - at least if they have the potential and finally success. Its just an alternative way to prestige and sexual partners, a more risky one of course, but with more potential success as well, for those being not able or willing to go on caved paths, quite typical for creative schizothymic people, artists or not.

Most "creative outsiders", socially successful or not, come from this category of people and without them real progress is almost impossible to reach since its their personal fanatism on "their path" which leads to new inventions, perspectives and reforms most of the time.

[kurwenal]

G.Miller's book, "The Mating Mind" is relevant to this topic:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/038...932866?ie=UTF8

[Savage]

For the direct and deeper experience of colors or tunes, the intellect is switced out. Consciousness should be in an emotional sphære, where impressions are not filtered or sorted by the intellect.

Like babies experiencing colors the first time, it is stronger, more nuanced, and more direct associative...Could say such experiences are closer to the archetypes they reflects. And the experience of archetypes, or subarchetypes, feels as real and reasonable as the balanced and filtered (limited) day consciousness.

Filtering and thinning out the experience via the intellect is nescessary to for example avoid drivers from getting affected by the beauty of traffic lights and the color or shape of cars.

And saving the mind from experiencing all the dirt that is around, or the dubious emotions, wills, thoughts, and tensions in our fellow humans, that we throug this free floating condition may easily snap up and even be affected by. Therefor we must have standards to separate between these, " to keep the sacrale from the profane ", all humans filters their input.

We were three sober boys on 12, that Sunday a formation of 5 colored lightglobes moved swiftly over Narvik for 30 minutes. As a good scout I calculated their size to be about 10 meters and their height about 300 meters at first. Shining on the brightest day.
And the moved without accellleration, just like electromagnetics, zip, form one position to another.

Our only potential believeable withness on our way home for camera, was an old man we met. We needed an adult withness, we pointed and shouted, and draged him in the jacket, but he could not see anything! We could not believe it, and left him, blind.

He filtered, and protected himself from seeing it, because if his reason should handle with that, all that he knew would collapse, his intellectual construction of the "universe" (...as he believed he knew it...)would be worthless, and he would ...exactly, loose his mind.

As a matter of fact, most people are blind, but it is their srtands that are the ruling normals...hehe.On the surface. Not so for us, still mentally deveolping and evoluting, open minded, and able to fit our minds to new realities every day .

Remember the wonder of light through emerald glass, beautiful colored pearls and windows, how strong it was? The colors of the flower in a nonstop symphony of millions and beauty...
The fasetto protests from gangs of grass straws and the flowers when being bent, even carefully with naked feet.

The first time I saw a certain blue tone, it was a new world in itself. an endless universe of blue colors to just fall into.

This tangents magical thinking, that is not uncommon between artists, and that is not unnatural, as one discovers that ones life reflects the creations and vice versa. One could say he writes his life, creates it himself, but just rarely are aware of the range of creation, that would be megalomanic.

Sane madness is a must for all pretending to make something new. That be valid for any trade, but the arts gives certain circumstances for constuctive expression of it.

Dedicating oneself to diving into such sphæres for times, of course shapes the personality. And certainly such labor creates different types than the standard A4 types that does not in these ways enjoy the priviledges of exploring ones inner spaces, refining and expressing it, cultivating and perhaps even subliming the experience into spiritual sphæres...

Removing the roof, with open sky as far as the newborn eye can see, and with curious and eagering muses and angels sitting on the top of the walls around the room, bathing in brilliant lights, joking and chatting.., waiting for the artist to rise...

Such scenarioes does well in an atelier, but perhaps not in a shop or an public office or at a police station?...

And of course, as for any other disciplines, the glory of good craftmanship and the wonderful gifts of manifesting beauty should be used for what it is worth, also socially, as all humans maneuvers with what they have, that is an honest and nescessary aspect of social life.

[kurwenal]

"The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.

Miller tries to explain the mystery of human intellect and creativity. Why would a creature (us) who evolved under the most primitive of material conditions, who lacked even sedentary agriculture until 10,000 years ago, have evolved the mental capacity for beauty, wit, rhythm, and truth? His answer is: sexual (as opposed to survival) selection. In short we are smart and talented because women preferred to mate with smart and talented men.

Darwin's theory had two halves to it, the one about natural selection and the one about sexual selection. To be evolutionary successful, to pass its genes further in time, not only the creature has to survive (this is where natural selection plays), but also to participate in sex, to give birth to a child, and this is the realm of sexual selection. But for various (mostly unscientifical) reasons, the bigger and more important sexual selection half has been neglected by other scientists of the time.

I found an interesting review of the book:


Reviewed by John D. Wagner*, Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA

Why have humans evolved such costly and complex brains? And further, why do we use our brains to produce such seemingly useless behaviors as art or music? Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller suggests that the reason might lie in what he considers to be Darwin’s most significant contribution to evolution: sexual selection. Sexual selection is different than natural, or “survival” selection, which refers to environmental factors such as climate or predators that affect reproductive success. Sexual selection is much more direct and potentially powerful; it is shaped by the mate preferences of the opposite sex. For these reasons, Miller believes that the inherently awesome power of sexual selection has profoundly affected the equally awesome trajectory of our own species mental evolution through mate choice. The Mating Mind provides a thorough analysis of how this devil lurks in the details.
Central to Miller’s argument is the concept of honest signals of phenotypic fitness, or ‘fitness indicators’ drawn from Zahavi’s now increasingly accepted mechanism of inter- and intra-sexual communication (1975). Essentially, an honest fitness signal is just that-honest, meaning it can’t be faked and is therefore a reliable indicator of the health and, for evolution’s purpose, the genetic quality of a potential mate. Given that combining one’s DNA with that of another is the name of the game for sexually reproducing species, selection on any traits that impinge on this process should be especially intense. All of this is rather well accepted by evolutionary biologists, and mechanisms of sexual selection in action are reported with increasing frequency in the animal literature. Miller’s contribution, however, is to apply this same logic to the mental traits that make humans unique: language, art, morality, and creativity to name just a few.
Miller’s professed goal is to explain human mental traits and he wastes no time outlining his agenda: The human mind’s most impressive abilities are “courtship tools, evolved to attract and entertain sexual partners” (p. 4). He suggests that viewing our minds as not only simple survival machines but also as courtship machines will remove the conceptual blinders that have prevented meaningful analysis of certain mental traits, which have previously languished under unsatisfying and unconvincing functionalist interpretations. Take for example, musical ability: The frequently trotted out explanation is that music functions to enhance group cohesion or solidarity. However, in bird species particularly, song production is clearly a means of advertising the vigor of its producer. Sexual selection views organisms as advertisers of their phenotypic fitness, and it is this component that Miller refreshingly injects into many evolutionary psychological exegeses, where it has been sorely lacking.
So what exactly is a ‘fitness indicator’? Miller lays out the characteristics: It should have wide phenotypic variability; males should be the sex that typically displays it more overtly; and it should be more prominent in sexually mature adults rather than youth. Also, it should be costly to produce. According to these criteria, a wide range of traits fall into this category, and Miller presents a lucid argument for how sexual selection has shaped mental traits into their current manifestation. His basic logic is sound. His arguments are well presented and convincing as far they can take us; however, a number of concerns do arise.
For one, we are left with the ineluctable conclusion that humans alone have seized on mental traits as fitness indicators and that sexual selection through mate choice has driven the emergence of creativity, intelligence, wit, humor-in short, all that which makes us human. One rather trifling problem previously leveled against Miller’s argument is whether mental traits actually indicate fitness or not. My hunch is that they do but in a much more purposeful way than Miller would have it. As I understand him, uniquely human mental traits have not been subject to regular old natural selection but have simply evolved because they served as proxies of general fitness, and as such, sexual selection has taken over to elaborate these traits. This leads to a more serious problem in my opinion, which is, why did this process take off in the human brain alone? Surely of all the creatures that have graced earth, others would have embarked on a similar evolutionary process? As Miller states, “If human intelligence and creativity were so useful, it is puzzling that other apes did not evolve them.” Here he gets to the crux of the problem. The only detectable explanation was that it might have been due to unpredictable “initial conditions” in which runaway selection scenarios commence. Miller might have allowed himself a backdoor by claiming that other species select for other mental traits and that this can be a somewhat random process leading to wildly divergent outcomes. But this doesn’t seem to be his position, given statements such as “Sexual selection seized upon the ape brain as a set of possible fitness indicators” (p. 131). As such, Miller comes frighteningly close to Gould’s “spandrel,” or byproduct, explanation for human brain evolution, even though he is at pains to point out that this is not what he’s saying. Instead of totally whimsical brain evolution as Gould would have it, we are left with only a slightly less touchy-feely version: that big brains evolved because they are entertaining (and of course because they are indicative of some more abstract fitness quotient, although this is never spelled out explicitly).
Part of this problem may stem from the fact that Miller bifurcates natural and sexual selection into two distinct processes. This is problematic considering that, in humans particularly, there may exist a close connection between sexual and natural selection owing to humans becoming ecologically dominant at some point in our past. As such, other conspecifics began influencing our evolution much more directly. Therefore, “survival” selection will probably start to look a lot like sexual selection because the dominant environmental feature influencing hominid reproductive success, particularly in the realm of social cognition, was other hominids.
In reality the twin evolutionary processes of natural and sexual selection are virtually inextricable from each other. A more fruitful model would likely involve treating them as partners in the evolutionary dance. For example, it is probable that sexual selection, or mate choice, tracks and periodically locks onto traits that increase reproductive success. This mechanism accelerates the rate of adaptation and, as a consequence, sexually selected traits can become extremely elaborate and potentially overshoot an adaptive peak (Wright 1930). At this point, natural selection might intercede to arbitrate the situation in a dialectic process. The important point is that in order for a mating preference to spread, it must by definition be successful in replicating. Miller seems to be missing the trees for the forest when he states, “It doesn’t matter why [females] evolve this preference… perhaps there was a mutation” (p. 71). As we have seen, at minimum, mating preferences must pass through the sieve of survival selection. A female preference for men who stab them in the belly when it periodically increases in size will probably not spread. Conceiving of sexually selected traits as incipient adaptations also alleviates the nagging circularity in explaining where sexual preferences come from. At some intrinsic level, natural selection sets the rules of the game and keeps the score, even if the playing field can become exceptionally large and varied.
Take for example, Miller’s explanation for how traits can become elaborated through assortative mating even when directional selection is not operating. Essentially, those with strong manifestations of a trait will tend to mate together and produce offspring that are even higher on that trait. However, the tacit assumption is that wittier, more creative, more moral, what have you, individuals were also fitter than their lowbrow neighbors, which actually must have been true on average, although it is difficult to see what sexual selection contributes to this argument. It is just as conceivable that selection could have favored organisms that allocated minimal energy to developing elaborate neural circuits, and rather put more effort into developing seemingly more practical structures, such as larger bones and muscles, which, incidentally are characteristic of many terrestrial Cenozoic mammals. The fact that humans did not take a similar route requires explanation: Why were genes for smarter brains more successful than genes for bigger bones and muscles? Which environmental and social factors might have been important? And why did this process occur so dramatically in one small twig of the hominid bush?
By bringing such a broad range of phenotypic traits to bear on his argument (everything from storytelling to breasts to sports), Miller risks explaining everything and by doing so explaining nothing-a charge to which he is sensitive. Miller is probably guilty of greedy theorizing, but as he points out, psychology may be due for an “indecently powerful” theory. Overstating the case for sexual selection may be forgivable in this case given the purpose of his mission, which is to stimulate research on sexual selection in humans-a missive that appears to have taken effect (Kanazawa 2000).
Miller sees sexual selection at work everywhere and he probably is right. However, evolutionists’ most cherished interrogative continues to lurk in the background: Why? Why have humans formed mate preferences for wit, humor, creativity, and intelligence? Why do we admire musical ability and adept oration? Although he presents a compelling case for how sexual selection might have accelerated or elaborated certain mental traits, in the end we are still no closer to understanding why these traits were selected, unless of course we invoke random initial conditions, a rather unsatisfying, and at this point premature, conclusion to most scientific minds. Ultimately, it is difficult to shake the feeling that Miller is describing a mechanism rather than providing an explanation.
As one of evolutionary psychology’s most gifted writers Miller has no doubt contributed a significant volume. Although written for a lay audience, the plethora of information contained in The Mating Mind should serve researchers well. The ideas presented are sure to stimulate discussion for years to come, and as such, should earn it a place on the bookshelf of every person interested in evolutionary theory as applied to humans.
References

Kanazawa, S. (2000). Scientific discoveries as cultural displays: a further test of Miller’s courtship model. Evolution and Human Behavior, 21(5): 317:322.
Wright, S. (1969). Theory of Gene Frequencies: Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, Volume 2. University of Chicago Press.
Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection: a selection for handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53: 205:214.
Buy The Mating Mind from Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk Amazon.fr Amazon.de Amazon.co.jp Amazon.ca
Computer-generated translation of this page français deutsch español português italiano ― also try this alternative fast translation service.
© John D. Wagner.
* John D. Wagner is a bio-cultural anthropologist at the University of New Mexico with interests in nutrition, social behavior, and evolutionary ecology.
Citation

Wagner, J. D. (2002). Review of The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller. Human Nature Review. 2: 110-113.

[Menydh]

All of the links that I've checked are wrong.

[Savage]

What presented here are all words, referring to an intellectual definition of creativity.

Sorry, any genuine creative mind knows that words are defunct on instinct, emotions and creativity.

Those aspects of personality are simply not within reach of intellect nor words, no matter how long the postings are. Those conclutions that the intellect reach, must also deepest be taken as theories.

Such "facts" as solid stuff, are such an intellectual convention. A closer look at the "solid" stuff, reveals it rather floating, and on an atomic level, consisting mostly of hollow space, and amazingly little mass of "solid" stuff. According to the physician Koestler, the content of solid stuff that builds this plantet, will be about the sice of a fly shit.

So what you think you "know", should very very often be removed with "believe", then we are more realistic.

Poetry are however a discipline that may attempt to combine these two polarities of consciousnees, but from an intellectual angle. However the real content is between the words, and between the lines.

The initatory posting in this thread is theory, and has not much to do with creativity. Like talking of flying, it never becomes real flying, but serves as intellectual masturbation. However interesting masturabtion, and well resoned...intellectual. It may however point to a creative process, but then reflecting what is there from before.

But...Creativity is practice, and is like flying, compared to talking of flying...Can only be done or not done.

Cant write anymore now, got a pretty young blonde nude model arriving soon...

Enjoy your theories!

[Agrippa]

Sexual selection is different than natural, or “survival” selection, which refers to environmental factors such as climate or predators that affect reproductive success.

Good article, but whats crucial and is that "natural selection" from a certain point on meant primarily intraspecific selection, competition of humans, human individuals and groups. That must be recognised especially for mental and physical abilities which can't be explained by climatic adaptation alone.