Cienciaes.com: The biology of creativity.

2021-05-26 13:12:33

Today, as usual in these Quilo Vintage programmes, we are going to address a topic that was already the subject of important scientific research at that time, and which continues to be so today. The scientific problem investigated is still far from being solved. It is about finding out what makes us human. What is it that differentiates us from other species? Is our humanity explainable only through biology, genes, cells, or, on the contrary, are there other factors, ineluctably outside the realm of science, that must be invoked and taken into account to explain human beings?

I confess that this is a question that has interested me long before I was encouraged to start disseminating science. For me it is a fundamental issue, which affects many aspects of the ordering of society, freedom and responsibility. I already talked about this matter in the first book I wrote, if the billet that came out of my neurons can be called that, entitled “The gods have been cloned”. A very interesting book for me, but practically unreadable, especially in this age of Twitter and Facebook, in which no one reads much more than 280 characters in a row anymore.

But going back to the article that I published in February 2001, it dealt with the thorny issue of the biology of creativity. This is a quality that we consider exclusively human. Well, where does this quality that is so ours come from? Does it depend on our genome and our brain cells exclusively? As we can see, this is an aspect in which science and the religious beliefs that we can embrace, not about the gods, but about ourselves, are on a collision course.

A little over two decades ago, addressed this thorny issue in this article.

At present we still do not know for sure which genes are those that can confer extraordinary abilities to certain human beings, but what science has been discovering is that intelligence, creativity, and other human cognitive abilities do not depend on one or neither not even from a few genes, but from a combination of hundreds of them. This explains why there are so few great people, since their appearance depends on the right combination of genes being produced in the fertilized egg from the genes of their parents, neither of whom possess it. For this reason, genius is probably of a genetic nature, but it is not for that reason hereditary, since it depends on the gathering in the fertilized ovum of hundreds of variants of certain genes that are those that can confer extraordinary cognitive properties to the person who is produce from that ovum. Their descendants, however, will not be able to receive the same combination of genes, since this will be lost in the formation of sperm and eggs, which only have 50% of the gene variants from each parent. Hence, complex human properties, not only creativity, but also qualities such as empathy, emotionality, sympathy, shyness and many others, are of genetic origin, but do not always turn out to be hereditary. This is a concept perhaps difficult to accept. How is it possible that something that depends on genes can not be hereditary? Perhaps it helps to understand this apparent paradox the idea that, if something depends on a single mutated gene, on a variant of that gene, it is undoubtedly heritable, and that quality or defect will be inherited from our parents if they pass on that variant to us. genetic. However, if a property depends on 100 specific variants of 100 different genes, to put a high enough number, if our father were a genius with those 100 gene variants gathered in his genome, he could not have transmitted more than 50 of them to us. they. For this reason, unless our genius mother had also passed on to us the 50 other gene variants needed to make us geniuses, we wouldn’t be geniuses.

Conversely, a non-genius father who luckily possesses 70 of those variants, and a non-genius mother who possesses, say, 80 of them, even though they themselves are not geniuses for not reaching the required 100 variants, will have a higher probability. high level of achieving the 100 necessary variants in an ovule fertilized by the two of them. Thus, genius, creativity, or any other extraordinary quality that depends on the correct combination of many genes at the same time, will seem not to be inherited and that, when it appears, it appears out of nowhere, or from the designs of the gods. However, in reality, from what we know today, extraordinary abilities, or normal ones in their wide range, arise from the random game of genes generation after generation.

This would explain why the idea of sperm banks for great men was not such a great idea. So far, no genius that I know of has been born thanks to this experiment.

And what can we say about Rudiger Gamm today? This man is nearing his 50th birthday today, and he has been quite an extraordinary person throughout his life. He claims that he learned to speak backwards before he learned to speak forwards, so it’s a good thing he devoted himself to mental calculations, because as a politician he would have been priceless. He also claims that he was the worst in his class in math and that he was only interested in bodybuilding to become a successor to Arnold Schwarzenegger. What a barbarian you were, Rudiger!

Fortunately, something changed in Rudiger’s brain, because he learned to perform some really extraordinary mental calculations at the age of 21, and also to calculate calendars, such as finding out in seconds what day of the week June 1 will fall on. of the year 34567.

Rudiger was studied by the team led by Allan Snyder, director of the Center for the Mind at the University of Sydney. Snyder is an expert in the study of the “sage syndrome,” which, don’t worry, suffers from virtually no responsibility position in the world. This syndrome is suffered by really rare people, who are disabled for some mental abilities, and gifted for others. I have never been close to one of those sages. The closest thing I’ve seen is the ability of some colleagues to distinguish brands of beers just by taking a sip.

Jokes aside, Snyder and his team concluded that Rudiger and others affected by savant syndrome were due to genetic causes. Today no one disputes this idea. However, I do not know if Einstein’s genome has been sequenced and analyzed for extraordinary genes. From what we know today, the effort may not be worth it.

So, dear listeners, if you are wise, congratulations, and if you are not, congratulations too. And it is that no one has been able to choose to be how they are, although they have insisted on the contrary idea during our, in general, very deficient education in these aspects of genetics and human nature. Do not worry so much about how you are or stop being. Don’t worry so much about how others are. Just accept them as they are, accept yourself as you are and be happy.

Jorge Laborda (05/26/2021)

Works by Jorge Laborda.

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