Creativity expert Michael Michalko gives this explanation of his fascination with Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution and the attempts of scholars to apply Darwinian ideas to creativity and genius.

"I first became interested in Darwin in college when I read about Darwin's experience with John Gould. When Darwin returned to England after he visited the Galapagos, he distributed his finch specimens to professional zoologists to be properly identified. One of the most distinguished experts was John Gould. What was the most revealing was not what happened to Darwin, but what had not happened to Gould."

"Darwin's notes show Gould taking him through all the birds he had named. Gould kept flip-flopping back and forth about the number of different species of finches The information was there, but he didn't quite know what to make of it. He assumed that since God made one set of birds when he created the world, the specimens from different locations would be identical. It didn't occur to him to look for differences by location. Gould thought that the birds were so different that they might be distinct species."

"What was remarkable to me about the encounter is the completely different impact it had on the two men. Gould thought the way he had been taught to think, like an expert taxonomist, and didn't see, in the finches, the textbook example of evolution unfolding right before him. Darwin didn't even know they were finches. So the guy who had the intelligence, knowledge, and the expertise didn't see the differences, and the guy with far less knowledge and expertise came up with an idea that shaped the way we think about the world."

"Darwin came up with the idea because he was a productive thinker. He generated a multiplicity of perspectives and theories. Gould would compare new ideas and theories with his existing patterns of experience. He thought reproductively. If the ideas didn't fit with what he had been taught, he rejected them as worthless. On the other hand, Darwin was willing to disregard what past thinkers thought and was willing to entertain different perspectives and different theories to see where they would lead."

 "Most of us are educated to think like John Gould. We were all born to be spontaneous, creative thinkers. Yet a great deal of our education may be regarded as the inculcation of mind-sets. We were taught how to handle problems and new phenomena with fixed mental attitudes (based on what past thinkers thought) that predetermine our responses to problems or situations. In short, we were taught 'what' to think instead of 'how' to think. We entered school as a question mark and graduated a period."

[From Michael Michalko, "Cracking Creativity The Secrets of Creative Genius," Ten Speed Press, 1998]

From Angelo Capparella [SMTPapcappar@ilstu.edu]
Sent Friday, May 28, 1999 459 PM

My wife, who is teaching FOI this fall, forwarded me this [above] item because of my work as an avian systematist/taxonomist and evolutionary biologist. The best I can tell based on my previous reading on this matter is that this account below is quite muddled.

Following is a bit of an oversimplification of what I understand really happened; I can give you citations if interested in the complex details. Gould was an excellent taxonomist but could not make much sense of Darwin's collection of finches because Darwin had failed to include a critical piece of data--location! Darwin was collecting under the idea of fixity of species (special creation) and this preconception meant that which island a finch was on had no importance.

After gaining his evolutionary insight later he tried to reconstruct his collection but couldn't; ironically, the only finches with location were some collected by uneducated shiphands who didn't have any preconceived notion of what data was important or not! This is why Darwin does not mention finches in his books; it was David Lack in, I believe, the 1940s who figured out what was going on (he named the birds Darwin's finches which is probably the reason for the subsequent confusion that Darwin had figured this out). So it was not Gould's mindset that prohibited his determination of what was going on taxonomically with the finches, it was Darwin's mindset that led him to not collect the correct data with the specimen.

Interestingly, Darwin did record island locations for the Galapagos mockingbirds he collected, although he considered them varieties (subspecies). Gould pointed out why they were actually separate species and this assessment has held up today. This revelation to Darwin was a key element in his adoption of evolution. He had the insight to see that if the Galapagos mockingbirds were really different species, the best explanation was evolution from one earlier colonizing mainland species. Darwin did see the big picture, but only after Gould corrected him on the details. Gould never did accept Darwin's ideas.

Angelo Capparella
Biological Sciences/Curator of Birds
Illinois State University