Psychology

“Triumph of a Naturalist.” Review of Evelyn Fox Keller’s A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock by Stephen Jay Gould. (New York Review of Books, 29 March 1984.)

I was interested in reading about Barbara McClintock because she was a Nobel Prize winner. [This meets our criteria for creative genius: A person recognized by expert opinion as having contributed something of original value to the culture.] Women are underrepresented in the Nobel Prize in science and I had been interested in expanding my examples for lecture. Gould states McClintock was the “godparent and instigator of a second revolution” in evolutionary science. (The first was Watson and Crick’s discovery of the helical structure of DNA.) This underscores McClintock’s status as a creative achiever.

In addition, I was intrigued by Gould’s statement that “She suffered the fate of many pioneers—incomprehension and bewilderment from most colleagues who could not read her maps of terra incognita.” [This fits the stereotype of the unappreciated genius.] However, Gould goes on to say that it’s overly simplistic to simply explain her difficulties as due to 1) sexism in the sciences and/or 2) a “maverick genius misunderstood by her peers.” Gould further mentions that McClintock was a difficult subject for her biographer because she’s very introverted and keeps to herself; this extended to sharing very little personal information with Fox Keller. [There is a criticism of the “mad genius” literature, which argues there’s a selection bias in what stories get told: only creative geniuses with colorful lives have articles and biographies written about them. I often worry that I am guilty of this practice in order to make my lectures more interesting.]

As is his habit, Gould begins counter-intuitively be stating that Crick and Watson’s revolutionary discovery of the double-helical nature of DNA in 1953 was “doubly conservative.” [As someone who teaches creativity, I was intrigued by the notion of a conservative scientific revolution.] He makes this point to show how path breaking McClintock’s research around this time was. Watson and Crick’s model was “conservative” in that it supported that standard view of genetic material as “rows of beads (genes) on strings (chromosomes).” Second, it supported a reductionist model in which you explain an event in nature by reducing it to its smallest part. As such, it argued that there was a one-way process by which DNA influences RNA. McClintock’s discovery of “reverse transcriptase” (or, more colloquially, the “jumping gene”) showed that the process could move in the other direction. (And she took a less reductionist view of science, which I will try to explain below.)

While admitting that McClintock suffered her share of prejudice against women in her profession (which she overcame by “dint of personal genius and an awesome inner strength that few of us can hope to possess [work ethic and ego strength of geniuses]), Gould points out that she had already overcome many obstacles and was recognized for earlier path breaking work by the 1940s. Rather, he argues, the difficulty of getting her ideas accepted had as much to do with her own idiosyncrasies and reactions of her colleagues. She lost a job as a college professor because of her “disinclination to teach formal classes” as well as her “contempt for ‘good citizenship.’” (In academia, this means taking on your fair share of boring committee work.) She spent most of her career at the Cold Harbor National Laboratory, which requires no teaching.

A second reason her work had trouble gaining acceptance was due to what Gould refers to as her “global, intrinsic insight.” [We call this the “Aha moment” or incubation model of creative insight.] If she encountered a problem, McClintock would go for a long walk, sit down in the woods, or try to think of something else. She was confident that the answer would come to her. Although I thought this was accepted as a means of insight, Gould says it goes against the way many molecular biologists explain their discoveries, which is essentially to lay out basic principles, followed by previous research, and then deduce the expected results from there. Needless to say, reviewers did not like to accept this as an explanation for her discoveries; they often referred to it as a “mystic.”

Although McClintock’s career is a little more complex than the stereotypical misunderstood genius, I still found her biography underscored many traits that characterize creative genius: tenacity, intrinsic love of the work, being able to spend long periods of time alone, and forging their own paths in the confidence that their peers will eventually catch up.