

Scientists confirm there is an inherited element to creativity - 001sky
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/want-to-be-a-writer-have-a-literary-parent-8200777.html

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tokenadult
Another crap press release on another crap preliminary correlational study.
The method of operatinalizing "creativity" in this small-n study is highly
debatable, and hardly likely to be generalizable to, say, creativity in
software engineering.

See Peter Norvig's online article "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and
Interpretation"

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

for a checklist of signs of faulty procedure or reasoning to look for in any
report about a research study, and see the writings of Eric Turkheimer

<http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm>

or Lars Penke

<http://www.larspenke.eu/en/publications.html>

for thoughtful discussions of genetically sensitive designs in the study of
human behavior.

~~~
001sky
_Another crap press release on another crap preliminary correlational study._

\-- This should have made the mock-HN humor thread =]

Original is behind a paywall, though. [1,2,3,4]

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Notes

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[1] HN humor > <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621731>

[2] Original | (paywall) >
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608012...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608012001276)
(paywall)

[3] This can't be as bad the Organic food one, though?

[4] _Abstract: The etiology of creative writing has been overlooked thus far
in studies of skill acquisition. Here we attempt to make a start by examining
the familiality and heritability of indicators of creative writing in a sample
of 511 Russian-speaking children, and their 489 mothers and 326 fathers. The
contributions of cognitive ability (fluid and crystallized intelligence) and
family environment were also taken into account. Results show modest but
statistically significant familiality and heritability of creative writing in
this sample, even when other cognitive and environmental factors are added to
the model._

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opminion
Journalist's list of latest articles confirms link between correlation and
causation.

[http://www.independent.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSec...](http://www.independent.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSectionUniqueName=search&publicationName=ind&pageLength=5&startDay=1&startMonth=1&startYear=2010&useSectionFilter=true&useHideArticle=true&searchString=byline_text:\(%22Roger%20Dobson%22\)&displaySearchString=Roger%20Dobson)

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Millennium
So the new question is, why? Is it genetic? Epigenetic? Memetic? This really
doesn't tell us all that much: many things run in families, including things
that cannot possibly be genetic in nature.

