{"id":9918,"date":"2025-01-26T14:16:26","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T18:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/darwin-on-how-to-evolve-your-imagination-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-01-26T14:16:26","modified_gmt":"2025-01-26T18:16:26","slug":"darwin-on-how-to-evolve-your-imagination-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/darwin-on-how-to-evolve-your-imagination-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Darwin on How to Evolve Your Imagination \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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The year the young Charles Darwin<\/strong> (February 12, 1809\u2013April 19, 1882) boarded The Beagle<\/em>, Mary Shelley contemplated the nature of the imagination in her preface<\/a> to the most famous edition of Frankenstein<\/em>, concluding that creativity \u201cdoes not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos\u201d \u2014 the chaos, she meant, of ideas and impressions and memories seething in the cauldron of the mind, out of which we half-consciously select and combine fragments to have the thoughts and ideas we call our own.<\/p>\n

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Charles Darwin in his twenties<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The chaos of ideas Darwin was about to absorb on the Galapagos would lead him to devote his life to understanding the astonishing imagination of nature, the way it selects and combines traits to create different species of dazzling diversity, each exquisitely adapted to its environment. <\/p>\n

Unlike his contemporaries, he did not consider the human animal the pinnacle of nature\u2019s imagination. \u201cNever say higher or lower,\u201d he scribbled in the margin of a book, arguing with the author. \u201cSay more complicated.\u201d Darwin knew that we are complicated by our imagination, although other animals \u2014 and this, he knew, was a \u201chighly irreligious\u201d view \u2014 \u201cpossess the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees.\u201d (He was especially awed by the creativity of the bowerbird<\/a>.) He knew that our triumphs of invention \u2014 fire and language he held above all others \u2014 are the fruits of our ability to reason, to question, and to make observations, but he believed that nothing has been more crucial, more fertile, more responsible for our evolutionary success than our \u201cpowers of the imagination, wonder, curiosity, [and] an undefined sense of beauty.\u201d (Darwin himself relished the \u201cchaos of delight\u201d<\/a> afforded by nature\u2019s beauty, by the sense of wonder that so stirs the imagination when beholding a primeval forest or a shimmering mountain peak.)<\/p>\n

Toward the end of his life, Darwin took up the question of the imagination on the pages of The Descent of Man<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (free ebook<\/em><\/a>). This \u201chighest prerogative\u201d of the human animal, he wrote, \u201cunites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results.\u201d (A century later, Einstein \u2014 who believed that \u201cimagination is more important than knowledge\u201d \u2014 would place this unifying work at the heart of creativity, terming it \u201ccombinatory play.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

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Emily Dickinson at work. Detail from art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By making the imagination the crux of our humanity, Darwin argued \u2014 in an era when women and people were barred from higher education, barred from the professional institutions of art and science, barred from general citizenship in humanity \u2014 that true equality between human beings could only be achieved when all have their \u201creason and imagination exercised to the highest point\u201d from a young age. But he placed the imagination above reason in the development of \u201cthe moral faculties\u201d \u2014 empathy, after all, is always a creative act of unselfing, a way of imagining what it is like to be someone else. A century and a half before Jane Goodall insisted that evolving our empathy is the key to reaching our highest evolutionary potential<\/a>, Darwin wrote:<\/p>\n

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This affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being. No doubt a man with a torpid mind, if his social affections and sympathies are well developed, will be led to good actions, and may have a fairly sensitive conscience. But whatever renders the imagination more vivid and strengthens the habit of recalling and comparing past impressions, will make the conscience more sensitive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Because he understood the statistical distribution by which natural selection develops, tests, and improves traits, he understood that minds too exists along a vast continuum \u201cfrom absolute imbecility to high excellence,\u201d and that different individuals within the same species fall at different points on it. But he believed that we can propel ourselves along the continuum and cultivate high excellence of the imagination by being vigilant over what we feed the chaos out of which we create \u2014 an evolutionary case for the \u201cgarbage in, garbage out\u201d model of the mind:<\/p>\n

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The value of the products of our imagination depends of course on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions, on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntarily combining them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is worth questioning how much of our evolutionary inheritance we are squandering by bathing in confirmation bias that only narrows the pool of ideas at our disposal in the combinatorial work of creativity, by feeding our minds divisive narratives that fray our empathy for what is other than ourselves and thus diminish the sensitivity essential for a creative conscience. <\/p>\n

On his deathbed, Darwin himself lamented<\/a> having failed to keep feeding his mind those greatest nourishments of the empathic imagination \u2014 none mightier, he believed, than poetry and music \u2014 turning it instead into \u201ca kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.\u201d He saw, from the wistful vantage of nearing the void, how \u201cthe loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.\u201d <\/p>\n

The most creative mind, in the end, as well as the most felicitous, may be the mind that never loses its appetite for wonder and its largehearted curiosity about what it is like to be another. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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