"The Origins of Creativity"--A Call for a New Enlightenment

 

One of my favorite finds at the annual AAUW used book sale in May was The Origins of Creativity by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson.  It was a surprise in several ways.  Wilson, who died in 2021, was not known best as a creative artist.  Instead, he was an internationally known biologist and naturalist.  In The Origins of Creativity, he explores how creativity became an inherited trait—one of the things that separates Homo Sapiens from our biological ancestors—and why it is important to the long-term success of our species. 

Wilson looks at how homo sapiens emerged from an array of early humanoid species.  Most of these were vegetarians, and Wilson notes that the move to eating meat was a key to physical changes that led to a larger brain and the eventual emergence of home sapiens.  That said, his real purpose is not just to see what happened, but why, and how many human traits reveal the unique nature of our species.  “At the base,” Wilson writes, “we need to explore ever more deeply the meaning of humanity, why we exist as opposed to have never existed.  And further, why nothing even remotely like us existed on Earth before” (p.197).

To answer that question, he calls for a “Third Enlightenment” that brings together science and the humanities.  “The philosopher’s stone of human self-understanding,” he notes, “is the relation between biological and cultural evolution.  Why are human beings built and behaving in such and such a way and not some other?” (p. 194).  The “why” of our reality can be found only by bringing together science and the humanities in a philosophy that is “the center of a humanistic science and a scientific humanities” (p.195).  Together, these can create a new philosophy, “one that blends the best and most relevant from these two great branches of learning.  Their effort will be the third Enlightenment” (p.198).

Over the centuries, we have moved from a culture dominated by agriculture to an industrial age and, now, a rapidly maturing technological age.  In The Origins of Creativity, Edward Wilson explores why this new age requires a new synthesis of our traditional thinking about science and the humanities.  Just as the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the social sciences as well as hard sciences, the Information Revolution must now innovate in a new approach to research and education that brings together the sciences and humanities so that future generations, enmeshed in a technological society where artificial intelligence has become a daily reality, can better understand the “whys” of our ongoing societal and personal evolutions and our relationship with the world in which we live. 

From my perspective, Wilson’s work is a challenge to higher education to find a way to incorporate scientific humanism and humanistic science into a new approach to General Education that prepares students to understand the “why” of our human experience so that they can best contribute as citizens of a rapidly evolving society, as well as prepare them to enter professional studies for careers in this new environment.  It is quite a challenge, but an exciting one, too.

-----

Wilson, Edward O. The Origins of Creativity. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017.