Understanding Genius - Sensibility, Social Awkwardness, Sleeplessness, Sex, Suicide and Sense of Humour

Geniuses have a variety of traits and it is not always easy to find a common denominator. However, many researchers will come up with a similar list of traits like the following:

• open to experience
• driven, but not by money or status (idealistic)
• hyposexual or hypersexual
• surprisingly humble
• great sense of humour
• playful
• individualistic/rebellious
• often very reclusive
• sleep less, like to stay up late (and/or get up in the early morning hours)
• less stereotypically male or female
• frequently suffer from mental issues like depression and Aspberger’s
• frequently had difficult childhoods and/or disliked school

This bundle of traits can be explained with a single hypothesis have argued before that personality types have evolved from our ancestral mode of subsistence:hunting-gathering, farming and herding. The vast majority of historic geniuses will be found in the hunter-gatherer group. Early farmers evolved the following genetically determined traits as opposed to hunter-gatherers:

hunter-gatherer	farmer
High on personality trait “openness”, (often)  low on “conscientiousness”	High on personality trait “conscientiousness”, low on “openness”
strongly (actively) egalitarian	status-seeking
Tendency towards out-group sociality, more accepting of diversity (e.g.  different sexuality, refugees, etc.)	Tendency towards in-group sociality (identifies more strongly with a core group, like family, religious group, country or sports team)
More liberal ideology	More conservative/traditionalist  ideology
Less sexual dimorphism	More (display of) sexual dimorphism
Monogamous to polyamorous	Monogamous to polygynous (with increasing social status)
More idealistic, interested in ideas more than material goods	More materialistic (focus on material productivity and material status symbols)
Higher physical and/or social sensitivity	Lower physical and/or social sensitivity
Night owls	Early risers
“Lazier” when it comes to routine work Hyperfocus on relevant/interesting work	More hard-working and ambitious, focus on planning and routine work
highly rebellious when feeling personal freedom and values are threatened	status-seeking, but also more conformist and highly loyal to their core group(s)
Less interest in small-talk and gossip, high interest in ideas	Higher interest in small-talk and gossip, less interest in ideas

Many of the traits in the hunter-gatherer category correspond directly to traits of geniuses. Early farmers had to become more conscientious, focussed on routine work (often having to rise at dawn) and hard-working, but they also became more in-group social (doing away with the sharing/caring hunter-gatherer mentality) and status-seeking as higher material productivity ensure more offspring. Farming required higher levels of collaboration Sticking to tradition, social rules and social rank ensured a relatively peaceful collaborative environment, copying the individuals with higher rank ensured their status.

Hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, never needed to work as hard as early farmers and thee was less routine work. Being able to hyperfocus during short intervals of hunting and gathering was much more important that steady focus on routine work. Moreover, hunter-gatherers needed to keep an open mind (openness also correlates with IQ and creativity)  to changing conditions and environment and maintain childlike playfulness up to adulthood. Play, laughter and heightened social senses (among the caregiving/female personality profile) are important social kit. Hunters always have to remain humble to avoid conflict and a hunter typically downplays the importance of a catch. Hunter-gatherers are also likely to have sharper, more sensitive physical senses to help them survive in the wilderness as opposed to a farmer village.

The traits of geniuses that aren’t directly related to hunter-gathers are a result of them living in a  society of a majority of farmer minds. They might find adapting to a farmer world hard starting from early childhood on, including schooling, which many geniuses found to be a prison-like experience. Being more sensitive they find it easier to focus at nighttime and might easily become night owls (or very early birds).

In order to understand the sexuality of geniuses, it is important to know that hunter-gatherers practice alloparenting, i.e. a lot of individuals help raise the children (it takes a village to raise children) and that gender differences between hunter-gatherers are less pronounced and there is no hierarchical relationship between men and women. While some geniuses are known to have been hypersexual (e.g. Goethe and, Picasso) the majority of geniuses had rather troubled love lives (e.g. Van Gogh) or even remained virgins and childless (the list here is very long: Newton, Tesla, Kant, Warhol, Jane Austin, Lewis Caroll, H C Anderson, etc.).  It’s not unlikely that their unfulfilled sexual desires contributed to their creativity. But why didn’t they find partners? One reason was certainly that there were many fewer potential partners as the majority of people have been farmer types for the past 7.000 years or so. In particular female hunter-gatherer, types will find it hard to live in a traditional farmer society, being “subject to” their husbands and having little support to raise the children. Also notable is the high percentage of homosexuality among geniuses (Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Oscar Wild, Alan Turing, etc.). Most hunter-gatherer minds are, however, fairly monogamous, with fathers having high paternal investment in their children. When asked what his highest achievement was, the famous physicists Freeman Dyson answered “raising six children”.

The higher incidence of mental disorders among geniuses can be explained by minds not living in the environment they were programmed for. After all, our world is mostly a farmer world.  The number of geniuses (Ludwig Boltzman, Turing, George Eastman, let alone the more sensitive artists and poets like van Gogh and Virginia Woolf),  who committed suicide is simply shocking. All this, however, sadly also means that geniuses reproduce less frequently than neurotypicals.