EVOLUTIONARY THEORY PROBABLY EXPLAINS WHY BACHELORS ARE MORE LIKELY TO CLIMB EVEREST, TOO

A researcher says marriage ruins a beautiful mind (Clive Thompson, Boston Globe, 8/17/2003)

Physics and mathematics are filled with prodigies who erupted with ideas in their 20s, only to spend the rest of their lives failing to replicate their early strokes of genius....

Armchair theorists have offered plenty of reasons why....

But earlier this summer, a brash new study claimed to discover the real culprit, and a rather unlikely one: marriage. In a paper for the Journal of Research in Personality, Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, declared that evolutionary psychology explains why male scientists, at least, lose steam as they age. Scientists achieve great things, he argued, because, like rams butting heads on the African veldt, they're attempting to woo mates and ensure their genetic heritage. Once they marry, their drive to achieve declines.

"We've evolved these big brains partly to attract mates," Kanazawa says. "And science is one part of what we do to attract mates."...

Half as many unmarried scientists made their major contribution in their late 50s as in their 20s. Married scientists, however, were only 4.25 percent as likely to hit it big in their 50s as in their 20s. For Kanazawa, it was proof that our evolutionary urges are governing our science.

I expect that around 2024, the Journal of Research in Personality will publish a pathbreaking paper by an unmarried psychologist suggesting an alternative explanation: It's hard to do great and original science when your kids want to play with you and your wife wants attention. Posted by Paul Jaminet at August 17, 2003 10:26 PM