The Origins of Creativity

Wilson (emeritus, Honorary Curator in Entomology, Harvard Univ.; The Ants; The Social Conquest of Earth) returns to the task he previously wrote of in Consilience: uniting science and the humanities to look at the how and why of existence. Although he posits science and the humanities as complementary products of the human mind, he situates the former as the bedrock out of which springs the latter, with its broader reach going beyond physical reality into the imagination. Wilson is strongest when explaining creativity and symbolic reasoning as evolutionary adaptations that allowed the genus Homo to thrive in multiple ecologies. He describes the coevolution of genes and culture, highlighting intriguing genetic vestiges of our common heritage on the African savanna in language, aesthetics, and other endeavors. Another recent publication in this vein is Augustín Fuentes’s The Creative Spark. Less convincingly argued, perhaps, is Wilson’s contention that the humanities must extend the limits of human perception (e.g., the visible spectrum, the range of audible sounds) to achieve their full potential.