I think I'm a genius. Should I have children?

I think I'm a genius... Should I have children? Cyril Connolly famously said: "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway." But Tracy Chevalier believes Kids open up a whole new world of things to write about.' Can both be right? Here we look at 200 geniuses over five centuries and whether the average genius eschews procreation for the sake of their vocation. 1500s 1600s 1700s 1800s 1900s Michelangelo Isaae Newton Alexander Pope Thomas Hardy Franz Kafka Few Leonardo da Vinei Francis Bacon Jonathan Swift George Eliot Virginia Woolf children Raphael Caravaggio Samuel Johnson Jane Austen D.H.Lawrence Durer Thomas Hobbes Voltaire John Keats Jean-Paul Sartre Erasmus John Locke William Hogarth Honore de Balzac Samuel Beckett Christopher Marlowe Spinoza George Frideric Handel Gustave Flaubert Herge Hieronymus Bosch Copernicus Ignatius of Loyola Gottfriend Willhelm Leibniz Antonio Vivaldi Edgar Allan Poe Dr Seuss Haydn Canaletto Lancelot Andrewes Lewis Carroll Salvador Dali Samuel Pepys Hans Christian Andersen Nikola Tesla Giordano Brumo George Herbert Joshua Reynolds Anton Chekho T.S.Eliot William Tyndale Andrew Marvell Immanuel Kant Vincent Van Gogh Frida Kahlo Donato Bramante William Harvey Edward Gibbon Michael Faraday Francis Drake Cardinal Richelieu Adam Smith Walt Whitman George Washington Lehu Stuart Mill F Scott Fitzgerald Paracelsus Robert Hooke John Vladimir Nabokov David Hume Friedrich Nietzsche George Orwell Alfred Hiteheoek Antoine Lavoisier P.I. Tehaikovsky EI Greco Rene Descartes William Blake Frederie Chopin John Calvin Miguel de Cervantes Jean Renoir Johannes Brahms Inigo Jones Andreas Vesalius Paul Cezanne Philip Sidney Nicolas Poussin Diderot Jean de La Fontaine Thomas Paine Laudwig Van Beethoven Albert Camus Rabelais 21 Velazquez Henry Fielding ЈмW Turner James Joyce Edmund Spenser Van Dyck Mary Wollstonecraft Stanley Kubrick Pieter Bruegel Oscar Wilde Laurence Sterne Ferdinand Magellan Claude Monet John Ford William Shakespeare Thomas Gainsborongh Gustav Mahler Marie Curie Galileo 3 Giuseppe Verdi George Stephenson Titian Robert Oppenheimer 3 Moliere Edward Jenner Benjamin Franklin Robert Brinsley Sheridan Castiglione W.B. Yeats Monteverdi Napoleon Bonaparte John Dryden Buster Keaton 4 Thomas More 4 Jacques-Louis David Christopher Wren Hans Holbein Pierre-Auguste Renoir Dorothy Hodgkin Sir Walter Raleigh Richard Wagner Ernest Hemingway John Milton Rousseau Hernan Cortes Isambard Kingdom Brunel Henri Matisse Rembrandt Goethe Palestrina Albert Einstein Pierre de Fermat James Watt 4 Herman Melville Henry Purcell 4 Palladio Fyodor Dostoevsky Bertolt Breeht Могart Jean-Baptiste Lully Mark Twain Mulla Sadra JRR Tolkein Francisco Goya John Bunyan Paolo Veronese Thomas Jelferson Abraham Lincoln Pablo Picasso Lucas Cranach the Elder Racine William Wordsworth Linus Pauling 5 John Knox Arthur Conan Doyle Igor Stravinsky 8. 10 11 12 15 Rubens Louis Pasteur Carl Linnaeus Martin Luther Max Planck Machiarelli Frans Hals George Berkeley Gandhi Karl Marx Lots of children Montaigne 8. Daniel Defoe John Constable Sir Thomas Browne Sigmund Freud Vasco de Gama 10 Thomas Edison 12 Johannes Kepler Robert Burns Charles Darwin Niels Bohr John Donne Samuel Richardson Charles Dickens 8. Nostradamus 20 14 11 Tintoretto J.S. Bach Leo Tolstoy Charlie Chaplin Vermeer Do different types of genius have more children? 31 % of geniuses with no children 33 35 36 Historians, 54 Artists & Architects Scientists & Writers & Philosophers, Religious Writers Engineers Composers Directors Average 3.3 2.9 3.4 2.5 2.2 number of children The received wisdom seems to be that scientists are the most insular geniuses, or perhaps the most socially awkward, and therefore most likely to be childless. However, in our sample group, scientific geniuses are actually more likely to have children than their fellow geniuses. What about non-geniuses? Reliable data about fertility rates is hard to find before the nineteenth century. So we've only compared our geniuses with the general population from 1800 onwards. Average number of children per woman (US) 5.3 2.45 Average number of children of geniuses 1800 – 1900 1900 - 2000 Average number of children per woman (US) 10 2.7 2.3 Average number of children of geniuses Conclusion In our (deeply unscientific) study, it does appear that geniuses do have significantly fewer children than the general population. But then again, when you consider that Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Darwin, Marx, Freud and Picasso all had many children, it seems hard to argue that having children impedes creativity. Whether these geniuses were the most responsible parents in the world is another question and probably another infographic... Disclaimer: We have chosen 40 'geniuses' per century. Obviously we realise that, outside of the obvious choices (Freud, Marx, Darwin), this list is going to be hugely subjective. We tried to agglomerate a range of 'Greatest Genius Ever' lists on a variety of websites in the hope of greater objectivity, but what we've got is probably still too white, male and European. And, of course, there will always be arguments about whether e.g. Tchaikovsky was a genius in the first place. In addition, we grouped geniuses by century, which is an inexact science (is Thomas Hardy a nineteenth or twentieth-century writer?). In the end, we tended to place the 'geniuses' in the century where their most r writing took place. In terms of their progeny, we have counted just biological children (including those who died in infancy) and legal adoptions. So well-known work Beethoven adopting his nephew is included. We have decided to omit stepchildren, because it's difficult to establish how 'responsible for these children the particular genius was or whether the stepchild played any kind of role in the genius's life. We have included geniuses who were known to be gay because for much of history, gay people have married and had children and, moreover, the high proportion of gay men and women who are classed as geniuses is interesting in its own right. Finally, we're only including children that are known and/or documented - 'alleged' children with mistresses are not included. Footnotes 1. Washington 'informally adopted his to step-grandkchikdren, so we haven't counted this. http://www.archives.com/genealogy/president-washington html 2. May have had more with his mistresses, but they were married, so chikdren were claimed as the husbands. 3. Sterne's wife had several miscarriages and still births which we haven't counted. Of the two danghters, the first died within 24 hours of her birth. http://www.kaurencesternetrst.orguk/wp/sterne-eliza/sterne/ 4. We hane counted five children, as Rousseau acknowledeed his ilegiámate children with Thérese Le Vasseur as his own. However it should be noted that it is unknown as to whether all five of these chikdren were Rousseau's. And they were all given anway to a koundling hospital and raised by neither parent. 5. The children he allegedly fathersed with Sally Hemings have not been counted, as there is no absolute proof that he was their father. 6. He probably fathered a son with his married lover, Maria du Fresnay hut there is no absolute proof. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HonorC3A9_de Balrac 7. One son King of Rome) and one acknowledged llegitimate son Chares Leon. There wete almost certainly other illegitimate chilklren, but be didn't acknowledge them. 8. There are some caveats here. Obviously number of children' refers to children per woman. Most of the geniuses above are men -and they often have chikdren with more than one woman (eg Charlie Chaplin, 11 chiklren with four different women. Secondly, we have junt used the US as a benchmark and our geniuses come from all over the workd. 9. hatp://eh.net/encyclopedia/articke/haines.demography - white population only, bl 10. Source: hp://www.economics.harvard.edu/files/faculty/26 Easterlin_CEHUS.pdf and http://eh net/encyclopedia/article/haines.demograply 2.7 beeaks down as 26 (white US and 3.2 black US, verage over 100 year period 1900-2000. ck population was counted separately. Illustrations: Conception: Lais Prado Stroller: Himanshu Agrawal Train: Vito Yankrvich Manks: Reed Enger All from The Noun Project CO 2] CO CO