Creativity: standing on the shoulders of Hobbes’ Leviathan
Root Gorelick · Ideas in Ecology and Evolution · 2011
Novel ideas in organismal biology are generated by (1) borrowing from others, including borrowing from obscure sources and other disciplines, (2) natural history, (3) attention to oddities and outliers, and (4) acute forgetfulness, which antithetically and hypocritically can be framed as inattention to outliers.When it comes to generating novel ideas in ecology and evolution, we stand on the shoulders of giants.But the giants are not necessarily famous people like Charles Darwin, Barbara McClintock, Francis Crick, Evelyn Hutchinson, Robert May, Rosemary Grant, and Peter Grant.Instead the giants are Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), a corpus of thought, distributed across thousands of individuals and labs over several centuries.Great ideas are often generated from the most idiosyncratic of sources, small anomalies that torment students, postdocs, faculty members, and other scientists.Even the most obscure person can generate data that are outliers that change the way we view the world.It is the institution of science itself and the funding of basic science by governments that form the giants upon whose shoulders we stand.The Natural Science and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) allows many of us to follow interesting threads, taking many unexpected changes of direction, including false starts.Attending random seminars at our home and neighbouring universities pushes us in new directions, even when-or especially when-the seminars are presented by graduate students.In the spirit of Thomas Hobbes, it should come as no surprise that my favourite ancientGreek philosopher is Mediocrities. My core research program on evolution of sex was inspired by an hour-long one-on-one conversation with