I feel like I read this somewhere. Maybe someone can provide me a source.
The premise is that the creative urge (“I think I’ll paint a picture today”) is very closely related to, if even distinguishable from, the procreative urge, and the fact that humans lack estrus but rather are “always on” means the creative urge is constant.
There is a spider somewhere (antipodia, I think) that builds a little garden house to attract a mate. The spider engages in this programmed creativity only when activity mating is proximal/imminent.
Similarly, the human pattern of creativity, while not as strictly defined, seems to correlate to horniness (in a much broader sense than “I want it now”). Creativity has led to the progress and edification of humanity, and the fact that it is always on means that advancement has been, more or less, continuous.
If humans had an annual estrus cycle, I suspect that we might not have developed the complex societies we live in or expanded on each other’s abstract concepts, because the creative impulse would have too infrequent for continuous advancement to take hold.
I mean, other creatures do not casually draw pictures or record stories without prompting from humans. And most other animals have estrus cycles – obviously, the language thing is a big hurdle, but I think sexual behavior patterns also may matter.
I rather doubt this. Anecdotally, although I am a creative type (music composer and writer) there are a great many times when my creative urge is absent. Certainly it’s less present than my libido, which is, as you mention, a steadier and more constant thing.
Creative urges of the scale you speak of form from a confluence of influences, but the libido and the sociosexual dynamic will always be there to supply the creative impulse that makes it all happen. The libidinous influence may be obfuscated, but it is there. If we had sexual seasons, the libido might not be available to supply the creative impulse at the key moment.
I have to point to a number of people I’ve known since we were in high school who are completely noncreative but have (or at least had back in the day) spectacular sex drives.
I’ll agree that creative people probably want to do it better, but that doesn’t mean they want to do it* more*.
I think you have to be in tune with all the influences that have converge for a moment of creativity (including having affinity for and skill with medium). Many people fail to become attuned to their peculiar creative influences and end up focusing more directly on their sexuality (and there is a lot of creativity expressed in that medium, if rule 34 is any indication).
Gabora, L. & Kaufman, S. (2010). Evolutionary perspectives on creativity. In (J.
Kaufman & R. Sternberg, Eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (pp. 279-300).
Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
See section 6.
The debate is first whether creativity is adaptive at all, or whether it’s a “spandrel”; and if creativity is adaptive, did it evolve through regular natural selection (i.e. did it convey some survival advantage), or was it sexual selection. From the article, a description of the sexual selection hypothesis:
It’s interesting, but as with much of evolutionary psychology it’s difficult to test these ideas, to elevate them beyond just so stories.
That’s certainly better than the statement I occasionally heard while I was in art school “Men make art, women make babies”, usually to “explain” why there were no great women artists. (Please, don’t get me started…)
Is there an aspect of courtship display involved in creative activity? Um… yeah, I could see that. But I doubt it’s the only motivation for creativity. Some creative activities are rooted in practical things related to survival, like making clothes and homes. Sure, you could argue that clothes are primarily decorative… if you live in the tropics. If you live at higher latitudes no, they’re not just decorative. Those who make better protective garments and better houses survive better, as do their children, leading to better reproductive success. Or, if you like examples from nature - beavers don’t build damns as a courtship ritual, they build them to have a place to live.
I’ve been an artist my whole life and would say that they have virtually nothing to do with each other, except to the extent that they both are about connection, both about living in the present moment, both about God, both about nature, both, you could say, about making something. Sexual desire is dependent upon hormones, art isn’t. I have the exact same desire to make art now, long post menopause, as I did when I was five.
Maybe sex and art are linked for men but not women. Men seem to connect a whole lot of things to sex that appear separable to me.
I have been on birth control for the past few years (to deal with PMS, not to prevent babbies). While my hormones still fluctuate, they don’t fluctuate as much as they did before I was on the Pill.
One thing I experienced in my pre-Pill days was that ovulation was guaranteed to bring with it bursts of creativity and ambition. They would be accompanied by perfect focus and high energy levels. So I had awesomeness to look forward to two days out of the month, and then the complete opposite a week out of the month.
Now that I’m on the Pill, I don’t feel surges in my creativity, but I also don’t experience slumps in it either. It’s pretty steady.
No, because I am not talking about individual behavior, per se, but the broader effect on the human species. there is a great deal of variation among people. Some of them defy our expectations.
And even so, you have to define what you mean by “asexual”. Some asexuals ale merely people who choose or prefer to not engage in sexual intercourse with other people, but may (or probably) still participate in the general sociosexual environment.
Children, well, human pupation is a very elaborate process that involves a lot of behavior acquisition (e.g., emulation), and given the pervasive sexual dynamic of society, to think of them as purely non-sexual beings is blinkered fancy. I mean, I remember how I was in my youth (much like I am now, but with fewer hormones).
I’m struggling to see how anything here can be substantiated, even anecdotally.
Claiming that you do or don’t feel like your creative urges are connected to libido doesn’t mean much here. Our brains don’t work that way. Take a much simpler example - parents have a extremely strong instinct to sacrifice their lives to save their kids. But I don’t think they really have any intuition that this is ultimately because it would increase the frequency of their genes in the population. The causal connection operated at the level of natural selection for a strong urge to love and protect our children, but the ultimate causal connection is not preserved in individual brains. We wouldn’t stop loving our children if we knew an asteroid was about to wipe out all life on Earth.
Testing any evolutionary hypothesis scientifically is equally difficult. Even circumstantial observational evidence is worth little, when we only have one example of a species with such extremely high levels of intelligence and creativity.
I can’t quote any scientific papers on this idea, but I remember seeing an embodiment of the concept in Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series of alternate-reality novels, published between 1994 and 2004. The aliens invading Earth were quasi-reptiles with a fixed reproductive season and a limited capacity for innovation in warfare and weaponry, and they wondered if humans’ higher inventiveness was related to their strange year-round sex drive.
