Environmental Variation Improves Creativity

It also suggests, at least to me, that creativity can be enhanced deliberately through environmental variation. Two techniques seem promising: varying what you learn and varying where you learn it. I try each week to read a scientific paper in a field new to me—and to read it in a different place. New associations often leap out of the air at me this way. More intriguing, others seem to form covertly and lie in wait for the opportune moment when they can click into place. I do not try to fo...

 Mullet's Ratchet

In recent years the geneticists have turned away from good mutations and begun to think about bad ones. Sex, they suggest, is a way of getting rid of bad mutations. This idea also has its origins in the 1960s, with Hermann Muller, one of the fathers of the Vicar of Bray theory. Muller, who spent much of his career at the University of Indiana, published his first scientific paper on genes in 1911, and a veritable flood of ideas and experiments followed in the succeeding decades. In 1964 he ha...