Two ways of being highly intelligent; Good genes or the Endogenous personality
Most people would
probably say that an Endogenous personality was a matter of sheer chance – that
in a population characterized by high GFP, a few individuals just happened (by
random variation) to have low GFP – and this low GFP/ Endogenous personality
group included some individuals of very high intelligence who were the
potential geniuses.
But our suggestion is different: picking-up
on a suggestion from British psychologist Michael A. Woodley, we suggest that
the high rate of European genius was not an accident. We will argue that the
Medieval European population was under group selection as well as individual
natural selection – and specifically that it was group selection which led to
the evolution of geniuses.
In a nutshell, the Endogenous
personality evolved in a high intelligence population to provide a significant
minority of geniuses, whose function was to be specialists in creative problem
solving and invention. The activities of this minority of geniuses had
disproportionate impact, and were of general benefit to the survival and /or
expansion of the social group among whom the geniuses lived and worked.
Indeed, we would argue that there
are two ways of being exceptionally intelligent. The usual way is that someone
in a population is exceptionally intelligent is by what is termed Good Genes:
that is, having few genetic faults or errors – the person has a structurally
normal brain, but with nothing (or nothing much) wrong with it. In other words
he has a low load of deleterious mutations (or, conversely, he is not suffering
from mutation accumulation).
But there is another way – which
is by having an Endogenous personality – which means that his brain is
purposely designed (by group selection
– the mechanisms of which are currently poorly understood) to be creative, to
make breakthroughs. Such a person is, in sum, a genius (albeit very probably not a
world historical genius; but a tribal or local genius).
Our assumption is that in the
potential genius – and if we could measure it, which is not possible at present
– we would see a brain wired-up to be intelligent and not merely
intelligent, but also wired-up to be more orientated towards internal
processing – more intuitively creative, more internally-motivated.
Therefore the brain of an
Endogenous personality is an evolutionarily
specialized brain; which has high intelligence not so much negatively from
lack of mutations; as positively – because it is a brain ‘designed’ (by natural
selection) to be highly efficient for the purpose of creative discovery.
And this is why the genius has a
special (Endogenous) personality. Usually personality and intelligence are
almost distinct and little-correlated; but the brain of a genius is differently
wired from a normal brain: it is a specialized and purposive brain, a lop-sided
brain, a brain in which some circuits usually used for social intelligence and
reproductive success are co-opted to serving a creative purpose.
In sum, the brain of a genius is one that is specialized for creative discovery
and both high intelligence and an ‘inner-oriented’ personality are features of
this specialization. This is why personality and intelligence go together in
the genius, whereas in ‘normal people’ personality and genius can vary almost
independently and there is little correlation between the two.
We have discussed, then, the
concepts of personality and intelligence and the factors that lead to
differences in them. We will now attempt to understand how these relate to genius.
