1,792 words
A few years ago, the late popular historian David McCullough published a biography of Wilbur and Orville Wright, inventors of the airplane. The book was deservedly successful, and I read it entirely for pleasure myself. The brothers were typical of their Northern European Protestant race: intelligent, soft-spoken, hard-working, plain almost to the point of austerity in their manner of living. Their father was in fact a Protestant minister, and they lived with him and their unmarried sister in a middle-class dwelling in Dayton, Ohio. Since there was no such thing as a paid position for people trying to invent a flying machine, they earned a modest living selling bicycles. It was the carefully managed proceeds from this small business that financed all their travels and experiments.
Once they became fascinated with the problem of flight, they went about solving it in a methodical and rational manner. Their choice of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as the sight for their experiments was made only after collecting meteorological data for the entire United States. This particular windy stretch of beach more than five hundred miles from their home in Dayton turned out to be the single best place in the country for anyone wanting to develop and test gliders. They had it all to themselves, because none of the many other men working on the problem of flight had done the thorough research into wind and weather conditions across the country that the brothers did.
McCollough was a serious-minded biographer who put no premium on tracking down salacious details of his subjects’ love-lives, but in the case of the Wright brothers he seems to have had considerable help from his subjects themselves. Both men remained bachelors their entire lives. When they became famous and an interviewer asked Wilbur about this, he simply remarked that he did not have enough time for both a wife and an airplane.
But a little reflection ought to make clear there must have been more to the matter that that. Just imagine to yourself a young man of the 1890s attempting to court a young woman. Her parents would have been right there in the room, of course; unsupervised dating still lay in the future. The first things they would want to know would have been what the fellow did for a living and what his future plans were. Now imagine to yourself the young gentleman responding that while he was currently operating a small bicycle shop with his brother, his real passion in life was to invent a flying machine.
I think the reader can get the picture. Many fathers and mothers would have been unable to retain their composure long enough to give such a visitor a civil sendoff. He was more likely to be driven from the premises with a stick and sternly warned never to show his face again. What sane father would consider even for even an instant betrothing his precious child to such an obvious nutjob? When you ask a prospective son-in-law his plans, you want to hear that he intends to study law.
If you compare either of the Wright brothers with the ideal son-in-law, however, you will notice considerable overlap: both would be smart, hard-working, frugal, able to delay gratification, and interested in substance rather than outward show. So why would Wilbur or Orville likely have flopped so monumentally with any prospective father-in-law they had the temerity to approach? Clearly because it would be outrageously presumptuous for a seemingly ordinary young man calmly to announce his intention of doing something no one had ever succeeded in doing before.
But at a deeper level we face the question of what sort of a young man would be capable of forming and carrying out such a plan—which, after all, the Wrights succeeded in doing. He would have to be unusual in certain ways, as men who achieve extraordinary things tend to be. And this brings us to the question of personality.
Contemporary psychology makes frequent use of a five-factor model of personality, with the five factors being Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Each factor represents a spectrum along which individuals may be measured, and in all cases, one end of the spectrum tends to be more socially desirable than the other. It obviously tends to be better for society, for example, that any individual be lower in neuroticism rather than higher, higher in conscientiousness rather than lower, and so on. From this, psychologists have derived the concept of a General Factor of Personality (GFP) combining the socially desirable end of the spectrum of all five individual personality factors. People high in GFP have more socially desirable overall personalities than others.
Now, if we wanted to describe the perfect son-in-law, the kind of young man a mother or father would weep with happiness to see their daughter marrying, he would certainly score high on GFP. In other words, he would be agreeable, conscientious, low in neuroticism, reasonably open (meaning receptive to new ideas and experiences), and more extroverted than introverted. Such a man will be friendly, emotionally stable, concerned for the feelings of others, able to get along with them, a good and responsible neighbor. If you were to ask such a man in his youth about his activities and plans, he would respond by assuring you that he was diligently pursuing some socially-approved goal—such as the study of law.
Obviously, a man like this is not only desirable as a son-in-law, but as a citizen in general, and is the sort of person most parents hope their own son grows up to become. What he will certainly not do, however, is invent a flying machine. He is simply too conventional for that sort of thing, not to mention too busy. It isn’t what a lawyer who is also a husband, father, and pillar of the local community will devote his few hours of leisure to, nor would he have a prayer of success at it if he did. McCullough makes vivid for his readers the years of dedicated labor that were indispensable to the brothers’ great breakthrough. Devoting so much work and ingenuity to the pursuit of a goal whose accomplishment is doubtful, and which may not even be followed by any external rewards once achieved, demands an unusual personality: it must have certain “antisocial,” or at least unconventional, components.
As Ed Dutton and Bruce Charleton explain in their book The Genius Famine, such men (and they are virtually always men) must be inner-directed and relatively unconcerned with the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of others. They are often marked by an unworldly lack of interest in wealth or status—not to mention in women, who are mainly acquired and maintained through wealth and status, of course. Accordingly, most such men fail to father children. From one perspective, this is a pity, for they often possess remarkable heritable traits we might like to see perpetuated and more widely spread through the population. But their reproductive failure may simply be a necessary condition of their extraordinary successes in their chosen fields, successes which often benefit their fellow man more than any offspring they might have sired.
Will and Orv, as they were known to their neighbors, were generally well-liked in their local community, and one wonders what the town gossip about them was like. Many were aware of their intelligence and the respectability of their family. Yet neither brother so much as finished high school; they were both what would today be called “dropouts.” And they appeared perfectly content to run a paltry bicycle shop. What’s worse, they didn’t even seem to put that much effort into the shop, leaving it to their poor sister to run for weeks at a time while they ran off God knows where for some undisclosed purpose! Their father really ought to give them a good talking-to, for it was simply disgraceful to see Will and Orv turn out so shiftless, failing to marry, start families, or assume the place in society to which their abilities so clearly called them.
Not more than a dozen people were in on the secret of why Will and Orv had taken to travelling to North Carolina’s Outer Banks every summer. It was only following repeated ignominious failures that the Wrights eventually succeeded in achieving powered flight, after all, and their secrecy in part served simply to protect them from ridicule. Much later, basking in success and fame, they adopted a policy of never criticizing other men’s flight experiments, explaining it by referring to the many failures and setbacks they themselves had endured. This was classy behavior on their part, for some would-be aviation pioneers really were no better than cranks, and their devices truly comical.
On December 17, 1903, when the brothers made that first, twelve-second powered flight at Kitty Hawk, all of five local men were there to watch. Little effort was made to publicize the achievement. The Wrights preferred to concentrate for the next two years on improving their flier.
Consequently, in October, 1906, the several hundred people who gathered to watch Alberto Santos-Dumont fly sixty meters in a straight line outside Paris believed themselves to be witnessing the first powered flight. The Wrights had long since progressed to complex steering and the following of preplanned itineraries. In the summer of 1905, they completed a 24 mile, 38 minute flight. Whereas formerly their avoidance of publicity may have protected them from ridicule, now it was crucial in allowing them to focus on their work undistracted. But occasional items began appearing in the local Ohio press involving farmers who swore they had seen some fellow passing overhead in a flying machine.
The dam broke on August 8, 1908, when Wilbur demonstrated the Wright Flier in Le Mans, silencing the French critics who had denounced the brothers as bluffeurs. The Wrights became world-famous overnight, and significant wealth soon followed. But their modest manner of living changed hardly at all.
While on demonstration tours in Europe, Will and Orv received letters from their sister warning them to focus on their airplanes and not get distracted by women. She obviously knew the ways of her own sex. The brothers were still barely forty years old, and had become what females vulgarly refer to as “good catches.” But no woman had expressed interest in them before they became rich and famous—at least so far as we know—and none was destined to get at them after the fact. They were fortunate the sexual revolution had not transpired during the late nineteenth century, for otherwise they could hardly have hoped to avoid mockery as “pathetic incels.” But we are the beneficiaries of the austerity and sacrifice which marked their lives and made their selfless devotion to discovery and invention possible.
28 comments
One has to wonder how many geniuses just disappeared into solitary isolation over the years. Theodore Kaczynski is of course, a famous example, and his hermit isolation only became uncovered after his bombing campaign. The books he requested through the local library are public record, and the record shows he remained pretty erudite until the day he got arrested.
I remember reading about one of the highest scorers in the Chinese National exams for high school students just disappearing into NEETdom, living isolated in his room, apparently doing nothing. For every Wright Brothers that invent something that changes the world, there must be hundreds of others with completely unproductive hobbies that lead to nothing. One just has to look at the speedrunning community and see the absurd amount of hyperfocused autism that gets pumped into childish video games. Hundreds of hours of rote memorization and trawling for programming glitches to shave a few seconds off a world record.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A
I watched this one with a friend a few years back and we just half-riffed on and half admired how much cognitive obsession went into a Mario game. The glitch itself being down to a tired and/or lazy Japanese video game developer using a float datatype when he shouldn’t have, a two second mistake became something one autist spent hundreds of hours working out how to exploit. The potential Wright Brothers of today are hard at work trying to establish a Maori 64 speedrunning record.
In a lot of old literature, you often find wise men living as hermits until they’re discovered by the heroes. Wizards and mystics and other figures. I always just thought it was just a literary trope for the sake of it, but reflecting on it a bit more, perhaps people back then realized the best cognitive talent often just chose to live alone. Perhaps some architects or engineers used to ride out to ask the hermit for insights from time to time, or perhaps so many people seen the highly esteemed architects from and engineers from their city just disappear into the woods one day.
Saint Augustine apparently had a mother that pressured him constantly to get into the Roman bureaucracy, the safe career path. Harvard University has the lectures of the early middle ages available on youtube, with Paul Freedman, he gives the anecdote there. She nagged him to stop wasting his time on religious matters. She was, of course, being rational, Saint Augustine was hedging his bet on a long shot, and someone with his talents would’ve had a very comfortable life had he gone into law. Nevermind that Rome disappeared soon after and all those efforts would’ve been squandered, while Saint Augustine’s influence is still seen today. There’s probably countless lost genius, again, sucked into being focused on worldly matters at the insistence of stability.
Perhaps there’s an analogue there for White Nationalists, the effort put into white nationalist politics here will reap dividends more than supporting failing western governments. No name groyper account losers might have more actual lasting impact than highly paid government bureaucrats, the same way maytred religious schizos had more lasting influence than a highly esteemed Roman patricians in the 4th century. Rome died, but Christianity lived on. Western liberal democracies will certainly collapse if we don’t change course, but our race will live on.
This is one of the most astute and insightful comments I have read on C-C, particularly the last paragraph. Seeking help from the mavericks and outriders is always something that is done during times of horrible ordeal. Civilizations come and go, but that we remain and move on, this is what matters.
Re your comment, esp. your last paragraph.
Far-easterners (philosophers) spoke of “the usefulness of no-use”.
Sorry to get religious, I’m trying to shed this, but I can’t help remembering these lines taken from a Christian poem spoken to those mourning a deceased at a funeral. (Sorry it had to come from Corrie ten Boom, but that may just illustrate my point further.)
The dark threads are as needful
In the weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned
Are you trying to shed your belief in God? I’ve noticed some faith-shaming on this site that seems odd to me.
No, I am not trying to shed my belief in some kind of creator God. I am trying to clean myself of the idea that I need to be “saved” by a “savior” who lived 2,000 years ago. No Christian has yet been able to explain to me what being saved even means in anything but the most abstract terms. I don’t want to “shame” anyone for his or her faith, though. That was not what I meant so I am sorry if I said anything to offend anyone here.
What an enjoyable read and interesting point about the men who should be passing on their genes. Because of social and government intervention it really does seem as if only the most wildly inept are procreating.
I believe the good news is that it can’t last forever. Nature was built to heal itself over time.
A Jewish friend (because I did not get Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique trilogy in my cradle) explained this to me long ago.
A rare White who is intelligent rarely breeds much. Historically he would go into a monastery or the priesthood, and anyway women want money not good men. “Whereas we breed from ours.” Hence the innate mental inferiority of the goyim, especially Whites, and their inevitable and desirable replacement by a better breed. Nature cleans the scum out the gene pool.
Having highly desirable White men who do good but do not get to breed much or at all can work out if the good that they do goes to their own race. They lose out, and our race loses from that, but our race as a whole is doing better, and so the gene pool that produces meritorious freaks gains in numbers and more meritorious freaks are bred, as they should be.
When the benefit of this kind of genius goes to all mankind, that is promiscuously to all competing genetic groups, there is no up-side at all in this loss of our race’s intelligence and good qualities.
That hypothetical about Wilbur and Orville announcing their plan to prospective in-laws to invent a flying machine was both hilarious and telling. It really does point to the role of sublimated libido in some geniuses—Tesla being the obvious case.
But it isn’t a universal rule. Franklin was charming women long before he was famous, and Edison, Bell, and Ford all married and fathered children while they were still unknown or modestly employed. Their genius didn’t preclude a family life—it just ran alongside it.
Marconi married twice and had 5 children, just as an example.
In days gone by, women were trained from birth to be supportive of their fathers and brothers, which in turn led to being supportive of their husbands, thus the saying, “behind every good man is a good woman”. Though I’m not naive about certain gender traits that even the Bible laid bare in Genesis, I truly believe that social expectations were stronger and the shame a woman felt for risking a failed marriage was a strong motivator.
A side note: Recently I was at an ice cream shop with my own teenage son, and a young family walked in. They had a daughter who appeared to be around 8 or 9 years old. She was carrying a baby doll. I was struck at that very moment that I had not seen a young girl with a baby doll in her hands in YEARS. Something that once was commonplace, almost expected, was now something that seemed rare. Why? Because toy marketing for young girls has focused on Barbie type dolls, a reflection of what society is engineering women to desire to be.
True, as my examples go, too. But does this follow throughout the whole population of capable men who should be reproducing?
I think the original thesis is hugely overstated.
Building a heavier-than-air flying machine was not so weird at the fin de siecle because there was also over a hundred years of experience with lighter-than-air flight, and the first airship had flown in 1852.
The Wrights were excellent research & development hobbyists, but the major factor that led to the success of heavier-than-air flight by 1903 was the power-to-weight ratio that was made possible by the Otto Cycle (gasoline) engine.
The Hindenburg dirigible (1936) had some big heavy Diesel engines with airscrews mounted on it, like a true ship of the air, and might have been commercially viable in a niche-market like the supersonic Concorde (1976) if the Third Reich had been able to get inert helium lifting gas.
That the airplane went from motorized kite in 1903 to terror machine of war by 1914 speaks volumes. This is what can be done when the state supports ideas that previously were handled in bicycle shops.
The history of rocketry has a similar development arc.
By the 1930s, actual airliners were being built on assembly lines and this meant also the capability of dropping tons of bombs onto targets by a single aircraft in one go.
Anyway, the Wrights had to build their own gasoline engine in their bicycle shop, and it only developed about 12 horsepower (or less than nine mechanical kilowatts).
When powerful turbine engines that could develop more speed with powerful thrusts over airscrews, and which could run on less-refined fuels like kerosene, were improved after WWII with mechanical power-takeoffs, we immediately saw the use of helicopters, some even with skycrane capabilities.
An unusual elderly aircraft, the venerable Lockheed C-130 entered service in 1956; it was a four-engined turboprop cargo or troop-transport aircraft that can takeoff and land on short dirt runways, and some models will likely serve for more decades still.
Today turbocharged Diesel engines have been lightened enough to be used with smaller propeller-driven airplanes because high-octane fuel with tetraethyl lead additive to boost the octane rating is banned now or extremely hard to get. Diesels are usually cheaper than turboprops or jets.
But back to the subject of “Incels.” Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be suplerlatively charming, possessing of blue chip stock portfolios, or practicing some kind of high-profile job as a lawyer or brain surgeon to attract women and to impress their fathers.
You just have to have some kind of gainful employment and a career or prospects.
It is helpful to make friends with the old man and her old lady too ─ as long as you don’t appear to gang up on the gal. The prospective bride tends to be slightly more interested when her parents remain slightly skeptical of her catch. But nothing is ever going to happen by doing vidya in Mom’s basement. If interested, you will have to make some diligent but not obsessive effort.
I would venture that people like Thomas Edison who had a wife spent most of his waking hours on his workbench with his hobbies rather than painting the town or attending endless dinner parties with the other half. It is just a matter of finding a compatible partner and then striking some life-balance.
If the Wrights were strict Protestants and avoided women, I would not be surprised to find that, like J. Edgar Hoover, there might be some latent homosexuality involved. On the other hand, being a bachelor does not prove homosexuality, latent or otherwise.
“Log Cabin Republicans” claim that Abraham Lincoln was Gay because Mary Todd was a bit of a cow that Honest Abe was reluctant to marry ─ and in those days bachelors often cohabitated, sometimes while traveling, sleeping in the same lodging bed. However, unlike Edward the Confessor, the last reigning monarch of the House of Wessex, the rail-splitter managed to father quite a few sons. I don’t think Abe was into dudes.
We don’t know if FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his Deputy Director Clyde Tolson who “bached” together were just close friends or “friends with benefits.” However, these were times before people openly talked about their bungholes, so who knows?
Hoover’s mother was a strict Protestant with German-Swiss heritage, and Hoover himself was a devout Presbyterian, so he could have been a latent or highly-reserved homosexual. He was highly-reserved about sexual matters for a fact, and despised hypocrites like Martin Luther King, Jr. But being reserved is not the same thing as furry queer like the Charlie shooter.
The future Brigham Young University professor and Mormon theology author, W. Cleon Skousen ─ was a John Bircher who wrote the popular books The Naked Communist (1958) and The Naked Capitalist (1970) and who was once a Salt Lake City Chief of Police, and later taught an excellent Constitutional Law course. Skousen was a Canadian-born farm boy who was educated in California and then graduated with a JD in law from George Washington University Law School in DC. As a young FBI agent, Skousen served directly on Hoover’s personal staff, and he did not think that his boss was a homosexual.
J. Edgar Hoover had a lot of critics and many claims about him were made by the usual suspects.
As far as Nikola Tesla, I have studied him extensively. The “rotating magnetic field,” the basis of nearly all electrical motors and generators and the modern power grid as installed at Niagara Falls, ranks with the steam engine as one of the greatest inventions ever made. Tesla was experimenting with radio-controlled mechanisms and doing HAARP-like experiments at Colorado Springs with the ionosphere and using the Earth itself as a Radio Frequency or RF waveguide, even before Marconi was sending practical wireless communications across the oceans.
Tesla liked women and the company of women, but by the time of middle age his OCD had gotten so bad that he slid off from virtual recluse to actual recluse, and could not stand to shake hands with anyone let alone socialize with women. Aviator and billionaire entrepreneur Howard Hughes, who dated lots of hot Hollywood starlets, met a similar fate.
I think there is something inherently suspect and fundamentally barbarous in a Nietzschean sense with religious orders that demand monkish vows of celibacy to attain spiritual enlightenment. This extreme sacrament directly selects for homosexual clergy and those with weird asexual pathologies, and possibly narcissism ─ and these people are then inherently given full access to young children. When an “oops” is made here and there, the institution sees it as merely little indiscretions, because “the flesh is weak.”
Plus, it does not take much prayer and isolation in seeking the Spirit before anyone is suddenly hearing dispatches from the Afterworld and thinking that God wants you to drown your kids as a test of Faith (LINK).
🙂
You spell the falls Niagara, not Niagra, the American way. 🙂
I did initially spell it that way but it was a typo.
Btw, there is another ancient Tesla/Westinghouse AC powerplant besides the one built at Niagara Falls.
The Bridal Veil Falls at Telluride, Colorado (LINK1) ─ not the Bridal Veil Falls at Niagara (LINK2) ─ has one of the oldest still-operating Tesla/Westinghouse AC powerplants.
“The power generated provides about 25 percent of Telluride’s demand for electricity and the plant still contains its original 2300 volt Westinghouse Electric AC generator, one of the oldest AC generators still in operation.”
(Image)
🙂
Three cheers to all the smart & innovative White men out there.
These two brothers have always given me so much faith in humanity. I learned to hang glide in Jockey’s Ridge State Park, NC. I went to Kitty Hawk for my 1st wedding anniversary, & my 3oth.
Oddly, until just reading this essay right now, I’d never once given thought to their lack of wives & kids.
Hmm, strange though that they would have remained unmarried and not parleyed their fame and fortune, once obtained, into trophy brides. I wonder if they could have had sexual abnormalities. Lately, I’ve become fascinated by the notion that certain specific sexual abnormalities are connected with a preternatural intelligence. Newton, Tesla, many of these people may have been of this variety. Some I believe were even married and had ostensibly normal, bourgeoisie, family lives, leaving cryptic hints in different ways. I think Kacynski was like this too, of a specific variety I have dubbed “the fierce worm.” I sort of live in my own little world.
many times, they become hermits and seem disinterested in the normal desires and passions of mankind. Sort of like the author said, the Wright brothers live very thrifty and austerely. I think it’s because most of our desires and aims are really psychosexual in their underpinnings. Even the desire for social relationships at all is sort of a gateway to sexual encounter. The further an individual is sexually from the norm, the more distant they are from the normal desires of humanity, so many times you’ll see them going into the wild and living in isolation and stuff sort of like Kazinski did.
Great article and resulting thread by the way.
Great article! Too much romanticizing of an earlier era, except for the fact white people dominated back then—it really wasn’t any better. As for the Wright brothers passing on their genetics, it was no loss–except for a loss in increased numbers. The famous men mentioned, who did have children–those children did not go on to achieve great things. 🙃
Well, one thing is that due to classical scholarship and the way history is taught, we tend to define things in terms of Great Men and bold examples, and refuse to see greatness in the ordinary ─ without which our civilization would have no greatness at all.
I would not necessarily agree that although Rome came crumbling apart and seemed to lack for Great Leaders, that they really had no very good leaders, and that some of these might have been humble Roman civil servants, jurists, engineers, and lay people.
🙂
Maybe Wilbur and Orville would have had better luck with women if their parents had given them more attractive names.
Joking aside, some commenters have already made the point that a man can be a “genius” and still get women, so it’s not really the fault of women. The Wright brothers were probably just too spergy to attract women, and frankly, it’s a good thing men like that don’t breed.
Nature knows what it’s doing most of the time.
It is very hard for me to imagine that the Wright Brothers were so Spergy that they literally should not breed.
People who are both for or against Eugenics, or some concept thereof, seem to have a problem excluding the middle, i.e., that there is a vast range of Normies between the drooling idiot in the institution who literally should not breed and the Gifted who definitely should. The genetic legacy of the Normies may actually be the most important.
Also, I fail to see the inherent Dysgenics posed from a few withdrawn but harmless geniuses at an “extreme” that might not be naturally predisposed to large families in the first place.
🙂
JS Bach (Johann Sebastian) had 2 wives (Maria Barbara & Anna Magdalena) and produced 20 children. He started making babies at age 23 and the last child was born when he was 57. Ten of them died young and the surviving boys became composers and musicians, namely, Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Johann Christian & Johann Christoph Friedrich. Johann Gottfried Bernhard became a musician, not a composer, but left that career to study law. One daughter, Catharina, became a singer and helped her father with his work.
CPE Bach is the best known of JS Bach’s musical sons.
If there was anything odd about JS Bach, I haven’t heard about it.
And then there was Beethoven, the complete opposite in terms of marriage and reproduction. He proposed to various women, mostly from the nobility, but from what I read they all rejected him apparently because of his lack of social status (aristocrat females were expected to marry up, not down), and unreliable income.
As for Johannes Brahms, he neither married nor had children, but he apparently once came close to marrying, then chickened out. He was also deeply attracted to the widow of Robert Schumann, Clara Wieck Schumann, but nothing developed except a friendship. She was a noted musician and composer; she and Robert had 8 children.
It’s a cruel world for some people.
P.S. I forgot to include this: “JS Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived, or ever will.” And it is just a matter of time before various parties make sure he’s disappeared or “arranged” into forgettable works.
Great comment.
Mozart loved wine, his wife and the good life. He didn’t handle money well (neither did Wagner), but had a few kids. Unfortunately infant mortality was high and one of his kids died.
I value musical genius over scientific inventions.
Yikes. How could I forget Mozart and his domestic history. Sorry & thanks. But Bach and Robert & Clara Schumann (she composed, too) were the first to pop into my head when I thought of the most (biologically) fertile composers. Then Brahms and Beethoven for contrast.
Of course, we could go thru all the master composers and end up with a whole new article, I guess. Writers – step on up.
It’s not just about scientific inventions, as you say. To re-phrase the Freak Brothers: Music of Bach will get me through times of no money better than money will get me through times of no Bach.
I love that you love Bach.
Great observations! My perception is that the only genes that seem to be passed down on a regular basis is musical talent. 🙃
That is an interesting observation. Or maybe it’s just a more noticeable kind of genetic continuity? Parents, or at least one of them, may have, for example, a seemingly only modest technical-mechanical aptitude which was never developed career-wise because of their life circumstances but it’s full-blown with their offspring, thanks to more opportunities for such expansion. But a talent for music seems to be much more noticeable because that’s just the way things are.
I think there’s such a thing as a musical family. Music appreciation tends to be cultivated in the family and it’s fun so people stick with it. Unlike math or something. The great mathematician Leonard Euler had 11 kids! He’s one of the historic greats. But regarding what I said above, people with sexual abnormalities can have normal families and normal men can die without issue; there’s no hard and fast rules.
Prime candidates for cloning.
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