The Origins of Creativity

Reviews / Votes

A meditation on how our genetic and cultural nature shapes our experience of the world, and how that in turn influences the form and content of our creative output ... A stimulating ride -- Dan Jones * Nature * From our senior statesman of Science comes this fascinating, eloquent, and important reflection on the vital kinship between the Humanities and the Sciences, the well of creativity fueling them both, and our need as a species to combine their truths to deal with today's demanding problems. It's a message that couldn't be more timely -- Diane Ackerman, author of 'The Zookeeper's Wife' An intellectual hero ... A superb celebrator of science in all its manifestations -- Ian McEwan Darwin's great successor ... One of humanity's greatest and most intrepid explorers -- Jeffrey Sachs Wilson speaks with a humane eloquence which calls to us all -- Oliver Sacks As always, Wilson tosses off astonishing insights with charming ease (he's a master of the lyrically short sentence). These profoundly humane meditations on nature, creativity, and our primal yearnings will delight his longtime fans and provide newcomers with the perfect introduction to the career and ideas of one of our most distinguished living scientists--whose high-school nickname, I was enchanted to learn, was 'Snake Wilson -- Jim Holt, author of 'Why Does the World Exist?' With his trademark boundless intellect and elegant writing, Wilson argues that we need both the sciences and the humanities in order to understand the deep origins of what makes us human -- Alan Paige Lightman, physicist, novelist, and Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT