by Kevin Ashton
The negro race has occasionally, but very rarely, produced such men as Toussaint l’Ouverture [the leader of the Haitian revolution of 1791], who are of our class F; that is to say, its X, or its total classes above G, appear to correspond with our F, showing a difference of not less than two grades between the black and white races, and it may be more. In short, classes E and F of the negro may roughly be considered as the equivalent of our C and D—a result which again points to the conclusion, that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.
This passage of Galton’s makes no sense, and it is representative of his whole book. Without providing any evidence at all, he asserts that the best a black man can be is a “class F” type of cow, whereas the best a white man can be is a “class X” cow; this is two grades higher, and therefore white people are two grades better than black people. The best case against Galton’s argument that white men are smarter than everyone else may be Galton’s own stupidity.
But Galton was taken seriously. He gave centuries of prejudice a facade of reason and science. His work cast a dreadful shadow across the twentieth century, and into today. Galton’s use of the word “genius” gave it the meaning it has now. To us, genius is what Galton said it was: a rare ability gifted by nature to a special few. You were either born with it or, more probably, you were not. But this was at best a secondary definition of genius in Galton’s time. It was only because of the rise of eugenics, driven highest by the Nazis’ belief in “racial hygiene,” that the idea of genius as inherited superiority became common during the end of the nineteenth century and was the only accepted use by the end of the twentieth. There is a straight line from Galton’s use of “genius” to Hitler’s use of genocide.
A hypothesis is not false because it is offensive or atrocious. Galton’s definition of genius as natural exceptional ability, reserved almost exclusively for white men, who then must ensure that only they father children for the good of the species, is not wrong because it is immoral; it is wrong because there is no evidence to support it. Galton’s only evidence is self-evidence. His life’s work was an elaboration of his prejudices, which were founded, as prejudices always seem to be, upon his conviction that he himself was one of a special breed.
All the evidence supports the opposite case: that natural ability is distributed among people of all types and is not the biggest factor determining our success. From the world-changing work of Edmond Albius, to the world-saving work of Kelly Johnson, we see that people everywhere can make differences big and small and that there is no way to guess who they will be in advance. When Rosalind Franklin revealed the human blueprint in DNA, she proved that there was nowhere for Galton’s hypothetical racially determined exceptional ability to hide. Genius as Galton defined it has no place in the twenty-first century—not because genius is not necessary but because we know it does not exist.
2 | ORIGINAL GENIUS
Long before Galton and eugenics, everyone had genius. The first definition of “genius” comes from ancient Rome, where the word meant “spirit” or “soul.” This is the true definition of creative genius. Creating is to humans as flying is to birds. It is our nature, our spirit. Our purpose as a people and as individuals is to leave a legacy of new and improved art, science, and technology for future generations, just as our two thousand generations of ancestors did before us.
We are each a piece of something connected and complicated, something with such constant presence that it is invisible: the network of love and imagination that is the true fabric of humanity. This is not a fashionable view among people who claim to think. There is a false intellectual tradition of complaint that paints wonder as blunder, mistakes snorts for thoughts, and points at human beings as if they were mainly shameful. “But famine,” “but war,” “but Hitler,” “but climate change”: it is easier to look for flies in the soup than to work in the kitchen. But we are all connected, and we are creative. No one does anything alone. Even the greatest inventors build on the work of thousands. Creation is contribution.
We cannot know the weight of our contribution in advance. We must create for creation’s sake, trust that our creations may have impacts we cannot foresee, and know that often the greatest contributions are the ones with the most unimaginable consequences.
3 | WHY WE NEED NEW
The biggest consequence of our creation is us. The human population doubled between 1970 and 2010. In 1970, the average person lived to be fifty-two years old. In 2010, the average person lived to be seventy. Not only are twice as many people each living one-third longer, each individual’s consumption of natural resources is increasing. Food intake was eight hundred thousand calories per person per year in 1970 and over a million calories a year in 2010. The amount of water we each consume more than doubled, from 160,000 gallons a year in 1970 to nearly 330,000 gallons a year in 2010. Despite the rise of the Internet and computers and the decline of printed newspapers and books, our use of paper increased from 55 pounds per person per year in 1970 to 120 pounds in 2010. We have more energy-efficient technology than we did in 1970, but we also have more technology, and more of the world has access to electricity, so, while we used 1,200 kilowatt-hours per person per year in 1970, we used 2,900 kilowatt-hours in 2010.
These changes are good for individuals right now: they mean more of us are living longer, healthier lives, with enough to eat and drink and a much better chance of avoiding or surviving illness and injury. The same is likely to be true of our children. But increased consumption will be a crisis for our entire species in the near future. It is not only how many of us there are and how much we each consume that is growing; the rate of growth of these numbers is growing, too. We are going faster and we are still accelerating. Our natural resources cannot grow as fast as our needs. If nothing changes, our species will one day ask for more than our planet can give; the only unknown is when.
These are not new concerns. In 1798, a book called An Essay on the Principle of Population was published in Britain. Its pseudonymous author warned of possible disaster:
The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall some where, and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.
Or: we are producing more people than food, so the majority will soon starve.
The author was Thomas Malthus, a country vicar from the village of Wotton, thirty miles south of London. Malthus’s father, inspired by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thought humanity was progressing toward perfection because of science and technology. Malthus the younger disagreed. His essay was a bleak picture painted to prove his father wrong.
Malthus was widely read and remained influential long after his death. Darwin and Keynes mentioned him favorably, Engels and Marx attacked him, and Dickens ridiculed him in A Christmas Carol, when Ebenezer Scrooge tells two gentlemen why he does not donate to the poor: “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Or as Malthus put it:
The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, level
s the population with the food of the world.
And yet we are still here.
Malthus was right about the growth in population—in fact, he greatly underestimated it. But he was wrong about its consequences.
At the close of the eighteenth century, when Malthus wrote his essay, there were almost a billion people in the world, the population having doubled in three centuries. This would have seemed like an alarming rate of growth to him. But in the twentieth century, the world population doubled twice more, reaching two billion in 1925 and four billion in 1975. According to Malthus’s theory, this should have resulted in great famine. In fact, famine declined as population increased. In the twentieth century, 70 million people died due to lack of food, but most of them perished in the first few decades. Between 1950 and 2000, famine was eradicated from everywhere but Africa; since the 1970s, it has been concentrated in two countries: Sudan and Ethiopia. Fewer people are dying of starvation even though there are far more people on the planet.
The only way this famine could have been avoided, according to Malthus, was if “the vices of mankind” killed enough people first. In the first half of the twentieth century, that may have looked right: the First and Second World Wars combined to make the deadliest decades since the Black Death, killing as many as one in every four hundred people per year in the 1940s. But after that, war deaths dropped. From 1400 to 1900, about one in ten thousand people died in war every year, with peaks around 1600 and 1800, during the Wars of Religion and the Napoleonic Wars. After 1950, that number is close to zero. Contrary to all Malthusian expectations, premature deaths plummet when population soars.
The reason is creation—or, more specifically, creators. When population grows, our ability to create grows even faster. There are more people creating, so there are more people with whom to connect. There are more people creating, so there are more tools in the tool chain. There are more people creating, so we have more time, space, health, education, and information for creating. Population is production. This is why there has been an apparent acceleration of innovation in the last few decades. We have not become innately more creative. There are just more of us.
And this is why we need new. Consumption is a crisis because of math; it is not yet a catastrophe because of creation. We beat change with change.
The chain of creation is many links long, and every link—each one a person creating—is essential. All stories of creators tell the same truths: that creating is extraordinary but creators are human; that everything right with us can fix anything wrong with us; and that progress is not an inevitable consequence but an individual choice. Necessity is not the mother of invention. You are.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a great debt to Robert W. Weisberg for his books Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts (2006), Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius (1993), and Creativity: Genius and Other Myths (1986); to Google; to Wikipedians everywhere; to the Internet Archive; to Christian Grunenberg, Alan Edwards, and Nathan Douglas for their artificial intelligence–driven database, DevonThink; and to Keith Blount and Ioa Petra’ka of Literature and Latte for Scrivener, their software for authors.
Most of the details in the story of Edmond Albius in chapter 1 come from Tim Ecott’s book Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid. Ecott did important primary research on Réunion to discover the true story of Edmond Albius.
Chapter 2 draws heavily from Lynne Lees’s translation of On Problem Solving, by Karl Duncker. The description of a talk by Steve Jobs comes from “The ‘Lost’ Steve Jobs Speech from 1983,” by Marcel Brown, published on Brown’s Life, Liberty and Technology blog; a cassette tape from John Celuch; a transcript by Andy Fastow; and photographs by Arthur Boden provided by Ivan Boden.
Chapter 3’s material about Judah Folkman is mainly from Robert Cooke’s 2001 biography Dr. Folkman’s War and a PBS documentary called Cancer Warrior. Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, and an article titled “A Better Mousetrap,” by Jack Hope, published in American Heritage magazine in 1996, were also essential sources for this chapter. The book referred to in the section “Strangers with Candy” is Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Robin Warren’s 2005 Nobel Lecture, “Helicobacter: The Ease and Difficulty of a New Discovery,” inspired chapter 4. Jeremy Wolfe of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston gave me an uncorrected prepublication proof of a paper he coauthored, “The Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again: Sustained Inattentional Blindness in Expert Observers,” as well as other guidance on the subject of inattentional blindness. Robert Burton’s book On Being Certain led me to many sources, including “Phantom Flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News About Challenger,” a 1992 paper by Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch. The full story of Dorothy Martin is in Festinger, Schachter, and Riecken’s book When Prophecy Fails. There is more technical detail in Festinger’s book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
From chapter 5: Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA is a wonderful biography of Franklin; Robert Merton’s On the Shoulders of Giants is insightful and funny.
Chapter 6’s description of the battle at William Cartwright’s mill is informed by the Luddite Bicentenary blog, at ludditebicentenary.blogspot.co.uk; David Griffiths of the Huddersfield Local History Society in England helped with everything about the Luddites, especially by sending me Alan Brooke’s and the late Lesley Kipling’s book Liberty or Death, as well as many pamphlets. The Amish, by Donald Kraybill, Karen Johnson-Weiner, and Steven Nolt, was an invaluable source.
All work on motivation and creation by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School, discussed in chapter 7, is wonderful, especially her 1996 book, Creativity in Context. The descriptions of and quotations from Woody Allen come mainly from Robert Weide’s Woody Allen: A Documentary and Eric Lax’s biography Conversations with Woody Allen. Annie Miler’s café is Clementine, at 1751 Ensley Avenue in Los Angeles, California. I recommend the grilled cheese. Good luck parking.
There are many books about Lockheed’s Skunk Works, which is described in chapter 8. Kelly Johnson’s autobiography, Kelly: More Than My Share of It All, and Ben Rich’s Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed both benefit from being by primary sources. Brian Jones’s biography of Jim Henson and Michael Davis’s Street Gang are excellent books about Henson and Oz. Lev Vygotsky’s Mind in Society is still fascinating today. Tom Wujec maintains a website about the marshmallow challenge at marshmallowchallenge.com; I first heard about the challenge from my wonderful friend Diane Levitt, who learned about it from our mutual colleague Nate Kraft.
The data about famine in chapter 9 comes from Famine in the Twentieth Century, by Stephen Devereux, and the data about war comes from The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker. “Everything right with us can fix anything wrong with us” is a paraphrase from Bill Clinton’s 1993 inaugural address, which was written mostly by Michael Waldman.
Early drafts of the sections “Obvious Facts,” “Humanity’s Choir,” “A Can of Worms,” and “Strangers with Candy” appeared in Medium.
Other references and sources are listed in the notes and bibliography, below. For additional information, see www.howtoflyahorse.com, which is an interactive companion for this book.
Many of the quotations in this book have been modified, with no change in meaning, to fit the text without the distraction of ellipses and square brackets; wherever possible, complete versions of these quotations are in the notes below. Some descriptive details in the text, such as facial expressions, are imagined or assumed; most, such as weather, are not. Most links in the notes use the URL-shortening service Bitly—indicated by the domain name “bit.ly”—and are simplified so that they can be typed into a web browser easily. The links will expand once entered and take you to the appropriate host site.
THANKS
Jason Arthur
Arlo Ashto
n
Sasha Ashton
Theo Ashton
Sydney Ashton
Elle B. Bach
Emma Banton
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Emily Barr
Larry Begley
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Aaron Blank
Lyndsey Blessing
Kristin Brief
Dick Cantwell
Katell Carruth
Amanda Carter
Henry Chen
Mark Ciccone
Paolo De Cesare
John Diermanjian
Larry Downes
Benjamin Dreyer
Mike Duke
Esther Dyson
Pete Fij
Stona Fitch
John Fontana
Andrew Garden
Audrey Gato
Sylvia Massy
Sanaz Memarzadeh
Bob Metcalfe
Dan Meyer
Lisa Montebello
Alyssa Mozdzen
Jason Munn
Jun Murai
Eric Myers
Wesley Neff
Nicholas Negroponte
Christoph Niemann
Karen O’Donnell
Maureen Ogle
Ben Oliver
Sasha Orr
Sun Young Park
Shwetak Patel
Arno Penzias
John Pepper