Hard to believe that the new year has come so quickly – but happy to see it arrive with such promise! We took two great weeks off, travelling to visit family and then heading to SF to make wedding arrangements. As luck would have it, we found BOTH our wedding costumes, rings – and interviewed two lovely caterers. With just a few months to go, I’m actually feeling pretty on top of things. Miracles never cease!
Our trip included quality time with my folks, brother & sister in-law, as well as Lulu, Zack, and the O’Dwyer clan… whom we’ve missed very much. Many good late night conversations and mid-morning brunches were had! This, combined with scenic walks and delicious food, comprised the bulk of our vacation. It was *truly* relaxing and refreshing – and I hardly thought about my inbox over the entire break!
One of the subjects we batted about during late-night conversations was the development of personality in childhood, and the effect of birth order upon such developments. This prompted me to break out “Born to Rebel” and pick up reading where I’d left off a few years ago. The book is predominantly about birth order, but is also an homage to Charles Darwin & his exceptionally brilliant work in the subject of genetics and evolution.
The main thesis is that birth order effects a person’s beliefs/disposition. In particular, the book evaluates the adoption of radical or dissenting scientific views and relates this to the birth order of over 2,000 historically prominent scientists. The bulk of the work is statistical, but much of the information is (by necessity), drawn from biography and personal communication. So it’s quite a source for tidbits about the inner lives of famous scientists.
It seems that with marriage approaching and kids a much firmer reality, I find myself particularly taken with the book – and sympathetic to the childhood plights of the scientists it chronicles. This morning – I was reading the section on parental loss and it’s effect on childhood adoption of rebellious behavior, and found a particularly compelling passage on how early parental loss informed the adult life of Darwin himself.
Darwin’s mother Susannah died when he was 10, and in response, his father & siblings refused to speak her name or acknowledge the death. This “wall of silence” created a particularly onerous anxiety within the boy, which was amplified by an overbearing elder sister who assumed a harsh “substitute parent” disposition towards him following their mutual loss. Darwin later manifested chronic symptoms of “hyperventilation syndrome” (spells of dizziness, fainting, and hysterical weeping). He became a reclusive workaholic, obsessed with his studies and deriving peace from little else:
Darwin’s vulnerable self-esteem also influenced distinctive features of his “scientific style”. A hallmark of this style was chronic self-doubt. In particular, Darwin’s constant questioning of his own judgement made him a genius at hypothesis testing. Unfortunately, this obsession with possible error exacted a continuous emotional cost.
Darwin’s propensity toward self-doubt was a powerful asset in his work only because it was counterbalanced by another distinctive feature of his personality. In the face of opposition, Darwin was remarkably persistent. It will be recalled that he made himself “dogged” as a boy so as not to care about his sister Caroline’s reproaches. Such scolding from a mother might have been recieved differently, but coming from an elder sister it made Darwin defiant.
Properly directed, doggedness is a useful quality. In Darwin’s case, it was fundamental to his lifelong researches on evolution. Darwin himself thought particularly highly of this quality, which was his personal explanation for genius. He was especially fond of the expression “It’s dogged as does it.” “Doggedness,” Francis Darwin commented about this saying of his father’s, “Expresses his frame of mind almost better than perseverance. Perseverance seems hardly to express his almost fierce desire to force the truth to reveal itself.”
Reading this last part, I imagined Darwin locked away in his study, deep in a dialog with himself about the facts before him – unable to turn away from them for fear of missing that moment when the pattern emerged from the data… “revealing itself” under the microscope of his constant self-scrutiny and analysis. On the one hand, this is the image of a brilliant, driven scientist who will stop at nothing to find meaning and structure in the natural world. On the other… a portrait of illness and anxiety.
In this light, it’s hard to imagine bearing and raising a child. And hard not to. The miracle of a unique personality unfolding is as compelling as it is terrifying. Too interesting not to try! Best to do your best.. and let the world work out the rest…
Hrm. That’s my genes doing the thinking, I suppose?
:)