Why productivity fades with age: The crime–genius connection

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00538-XGet rights and content

Abstract

The biographies of 280 scientists indicate that the distribution of their age at the time of their greatest scientific contributions in their careers (age–genius curve) is similar to the age distribution of criminals (age–crime curve). The age–genius curves among jazz musicians, painters and authors are also similar to the age–crime curve. Further, marriage has a strong desistance effect on both crime and genius. I argue that this is because both crime and genius stem from men’s evolved psychological mechanism which compels them to be highly competitive in early adulthood but “turns off” when they get married and have children. Fluctuating levels of testosterone, which decreases when men get married and have children, can provide the biochemical microfoundation for this psychological mechanism. If crime and genius have the same underlying cause, then it is unlikely that social control theory (or any other theory specific to criminal behavior) can explain why men commit crimes and why they desist.

Introduction

A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.
Albert Einstein (Brodetsky, 1942, p. 699)
Anecdotal evidence abounds that artistic genius or productivity fades with age. Paul McCartney has not written a hit song in years, and now spends his time painting. J.D. Salinger now lives as a total recluse and has not published anything in more than three decades. Orson Welles was mere 26 when he wrote, produced, directed and starred in Citizen Kane, which many consider to be the greatest movie ever made.
The relationship between age and genius appears to be the same in science. It is often said that physics and mathematics are young men’s games, and physicists and mathematicians tend to think they are over the hill at age 25 (Mukerjee, 1996). John von Neumann, putatively the most brilliant scientist who ever lived, used to assert brashly when he was young that mathematical powers decline after the age of 26, and only the benefits of experience conceal the decline—for a time anyway. (As von Neumann himself aged, however, he raised this limiting age.) (Poundstone, 1992, p. 16). James D. Watson made the greatest discovery in biology in the 20th century at the age of 25, winning the Nobel prize for it, but has not made any other significant scientific contribution for the rest of his career.
This paper addresses two questions. Does productivity truly fade with age? If so, what explains this phenomenon? While the question of why productivity fades with age in itself may be of trivial scientific importance, I will argue that the study of the age trajectories of scientists and other geniuses illuminates a very important question in behavioral science: Why men commit crimes and why they desist. I will note that the relationship between age and genius, not only among scientists but among musicians, painters, and authors as well, is very similar to the relationship between age and criminality, and suggest that this is because the same mechanism produces the expressions of both genius and criminality. I will further note that marriage has the same negative effect on both genius and criminality, and thus any criminological theory that explains the desistance effect of marriage purely in terms of social control is not sufficient (because scientists, unlike criminals, are not subject to social control, and because scientific work is not illegal or deviant in any way).

Access through your organization

Check access to the full text by signing in through your organization.

Access through your organization

Section snippets

Does productivity really fade with age?

In order to examine the relationship between age and scientific productivity, I study a random sample of the biographies of 280 scientists (mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists) from The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists (Porter, 1994). There are a few scientists from the 16th and 17th centuries, but the overwhelming majority comes from the 18th century to the present. The biography of each scientist in this dictionary follows the same format. The first, brief paragraph

What about other types of productivity?

Fig. 1 demonstrates the age distribution of scientific productivity, but what about other types of productivity? Scientific discoveries are not the only way genius expresses itself. What about more artistic forms of genius? Music? Literature?
Fig. 2 presents the relationship between age and productivity in jazz music (Miller, 1999, Fig. 5.1). It plots, separately for men and women, the age at which 719 jazz musicians released their 1892 albums. (Unlike the age distribution of the greatest

The crime–genius connection

The most curious aspect of the relationship between age and genius represented in Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4 is that these distributions (which I would like to call the “age–genius curves”) very closely resemble another very well-known age distribution: The invariant age–crime curve (Hirschi & Gottfredson, 1983), presented in Fig. 5. Criminologists widely recognize that criminal behavior, especially among men, rapidly rises during adolescence, peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood,

The comparable effect of marriage on crime and genius

Crime and genius share something else in common: Marriage depresses both. Fig. 7 presents the age–genius curve separately for scientists who were married sometime in their lives (n=186) and for scientists who remained unmarried for their entire lives (n=72). (I used Debus (1968) and Gillispie (1970–1980) to obtain information on the scientists’ marital history, but I was not able to ascertain the marital history of 22 scientists.) The histograms clearly show that the age–genius curve holds only

Conclusion

Perhaps the tragic life of the French mathematician Évariste Galois (1811–1832) best illustrates my argument (Singh, 1997, pp. 210–228). Despite the fact that he died at age 20, Galois made a large number of significant contributions to mathematics. (His work was integral to Andrew Wiles’ celebrated proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994.) Galois was involved in an affair, and the woman’s fiancé challenged him to a duel. The night before the duel, Galois stayed up all night and wrote down all

Acknowledgements

I thank Barbara J. Costello, Steven W. Gangestad, Travis Hirschi, Rosemary L. Hopcroft, Christine Horne, Alan S. Miller, Joanne Savage, and Dean Keith Simonton for their comments on earlier drafts.

References (30)

  • L. Ellis

    Neodarwinian theories of violent criminality and antisocial behavior: Photographic evidence from nonhuman animals and a review of the literature

    Aggression and Violent Behavior

    (1998)
  • D. Blum

    Sex on the brain: The biological differences between men and women

    (1997)
  • A. Blumstein

    Youth violence, guns, and the illicit-drug industry

    Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

    (1995)
  • S. Brodetsky

    Newton: Scientist and man

    Nature

    (1942)
  • S. Cole

    Age and scientific performance

    American Journal of Sociology

    (1979)
  • M. Daly et al.

    Homicide

    (1988)
  • M. Daly et al.

    Killing the competition: Female/female and male/male homicide

    Human Nature

    (1990)
  • Gillispie, C.C., (Editor in Chief.) 1970–1980. Dictionary of scientific biography (16 Volumes.) New York: Charles...
  • S. Glueck et al.

    Delinquents and nondelinquents in perspective

    (1968)
  • L.L. Hargens et al.

    Productivity and reproductivity: Fertility and professional achievement among research scientists

    Social Forces

    (1978)
  • T. Hirschi

    Causes of delinquency

    (1969)
  • T. Hirschi et al.

    Age and the explanation of crime

    American Journal of Sociology

    (1983)
  • S. Kanazawa

    De Gustibus Est Disputandum

    Social Forces

    (2001)

    • Cited by (76)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text
    Copyright © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.