Edward Dutton - Sent Before Their Time: Genius, Charisma, and Being Born Prematurely

SENT BEFORE THEIR TIME

Genius, Charisma, and Being Born Prematurely

Edward Dutton

Manticore Press

Copyright 2022 Manticore Press, Melbourne, Australia.

978-0-6452126-3-1
All rights reserved, no section of this book may be utilized without permission, except brief quotations, including electronic reproductions without the permission of the copyright holders and publisher. Published in Australia.
Thema Classification: VSP (Popular Psychology), VFXB (Pregnancy & Birth Issues), QDX (Popular Philosophy), PDZ (Popular Science).

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stampd, and want loves majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtaild of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinishd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up ...

Richard III, (Act I, Scene I). William Shakespeare.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A NUMBER OF PARTS of this book have previously appeared, in various forms, in my earlier works The Genius Famine (with Bruce Charlton, 2016), At Our Wits End: Why Were Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future (with Michael Woodley of Menie, 2018), Churchills Headmaster: The Sadist Who Nearly Saved the British Empire (2019), Witches, Feminism and the Fall of the West (2021) and The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution (with J. O. A. Rayner-Hilles, In Press).

A variety of people have assisted me in researching this book. I would like to thank Dr Bruce Charlton, J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, Esq. and Dr Michael Woodley of Menie for reading over the manuscript and providing very useful feedback. Prof. Guy Madison and Prof. Dimitri Van der Linden read a very early version of the manuscript and made various suggestions, for which I would like to express my gratitude. Herr Emil Kirkegaard conducted the statistical analyses in this book, for which I am very grateful. I am indebted to Dr Mikko Lhdesmki for information on the relevance of telomere length as it pertains to this study. Finally, I would also like to thank Prof. Terry Murphy for his help with the section of the book on preemies in literature, my Latvian former-student for sharing with me her memories of her premature childhood for use in this book and my parents for their assistance with the section on my own prematurity.

Edward Dutton

November 2021

FOREWORD

DR BRUCE G. CHARLTON

P REMATURE BIRTH IS A bad start to life. It is associated with a higher lifelong risk of many physical and psychological problems. We would therefore expect that prematurity ruled-out high levels of attainment. But something like the opposite is found; and a surprisingly large number of famous and eminent achievers were born prematurely.

It was perhaps because Edward Dutton began life as a premature baby that he noticed this remarkable phenomenon of preemie geniuses. Duttons theory is that while prematurity is usually bad for health, reproduction, and life-expectancy; nonetheless it may trigger extreme compensatory aptitudes that may greatly benefit the wider community.

Already well known for generating interesting and fertile evolutionary hypotheses, Sent Before Their Time is Edward Duttons biggest and best idea yet.

Dr Bruce G. Charlton, sometime Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham, Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle University and Editor of Medical Hypotheses.

CHAPTER ONE

BRAIN DAMAGE, PRETERM BIRTH, AND BRILLIANCE

A Miracle in Lincolnshire

O N CHRISTMAS DAY 1642, a minor miracle took place in a small Lincolnshire hamlet. Hannah, whose husband had died three months earlier, gave birth to a boy. Still grieving for her partner, the yeoman farmers daughter might have assumed that things couldnt get any worse. But they could. This baby boy was born about two months early. He was so small that he could fit inside a quart mug. Nobody expected the poor little lad to survive. Hed be dead, within a few days at most. Thats what always happened to babies that were sent too soon. But, somehow, this boy pulled through.

He pulled through, but he wasnt normal. Not yet ready to enter the world, he would have suffered brain damage in the birth process, and his brain would have developed in a very strange way. He grew up to have a noticeably small head and to be only 5 foot 6 short for a man from his wealthy, yeoman farmer background, just below the ranks of the gentry. [1] And he was also an extremely unusual person.

Deeply unpleasant, he had few friends, no romantic relationships, and was a religious zealot who believed God had chosen him to unlock the secrets of the universe. He once threatened to burn his mothers house down with her in it. A religious heretic, he was obsessed with alchemy, even refusing the last rites when the time came, due to his unorthodox religious views. He would remain lost in thought on the stairs for hours despite hosting guests. He was left- handed, something even more unusual at the time than it is now. He didnt shine at school, and he nearly failed his degree while at Cambridge University. He almost never spoke, frequently forgot to eat, and was a virtual recluse for most of his life. But added to this was his quite incredible, but extremely narrow, intelligence.

The miracle baby, born on Christmas Day 1642, was Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Despite being obsessed with alchemy and with finding hidden codes in the Bible, Newton was the founder of modern science. Between 1665 and 1667, Newton sheltering from the plague in his Lincolnshire hamlet of Woolsthorpe discovered calculus, optics, and the Law of Gravitation, all by the age of 24. In 1687, Newton formulated the three laws of classical mechanics regarding the movement of objects, which are fundamental to all Physics. He worked out the precise shape of the Earth, risked his sight to discover that color was a property of light, and designed the first serious telescope. On the other hand, though, he was an extremely cold-hearted and difficult man. You wouldnt have wanted him as a neighbor, and he wouldnt have wanted you or anybody else as a friend (Westfall, 1983).

Geniuses: Ahead of Their Time ...

Newton was a genius. A genius in the sciences is defined as somebody who makes a hugely important, earth-shattering discovery or breakthrough, agreed as having been such by numerous others in the field (Murray, 2003). Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) is a genius because he discovered the laws of planetary motion, which were the foundations of Newtons theory of gravitation (Gilder & Gilder, 2005). Non-genius scientists have developed Keplers finding and taken it in new and intriguing directions. But it was Kepler who was the genius, the one who made the ground-breaking discovery. Artistic genius is fairly similar. It is an artist in the broadest sense of the word who changes the direction of his art, is fundamentally original, is highly influential on the future of his art form, with people widely agreeing that this is the case: English poet John Keats (1795-1821) is a suggested example (Pitfield, 1930). Then there is the military, political or religious genius: the awe-inspiring, charismatic leader whose pure force of will and ability manages to found a new society out of the ashes or to rescue a country on the brink of collapse: Winston Churchill, leading Britain through her darkest hour and defeating Nazi Germany (Napier, 2018), or Moses unshackling his people from slavery and taking them to the Promised Land (Moses, 1894, p.27). These are the kind of people whom youd follow to the ends of the earth, who can inspire you to super-human feats; who as German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) puts it can make a cold world feel warm again (Weber, 1991).