""Rather than being heroic geniuses, Darwin and Wallace were in the same ‘cultural milieu’, both reading the same books and both travelling to biologically diverse island environments. While individual abilities vary, collective brains make each brain within it cleverer. The theory helps explain why there have been dramatic increases in IQ test scores over time.
Individuals copy other successful individuals – eating the foods they ate or hunting with the tools they used, for example – to become successful themselves without necessarily understanding why. Dr Muthukrishna added: “The processes of cumulative cultural evolution allow technologies and techniques to emerge, which no single individual could create on their own – because human brains, in isolation, aren’t actually all that smart."
You could probably say the same about most geniuses. Yes, there have been some people who have made stunning breakthroughs - often in large part thanks to their extreme intelligence and/or dedication. But it almost never happens only because of their own efforts. More usually it's because they were standing not on the shoulders of giants but on people of about average height who spent years working on apparently insignificant details.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/12176959/Charles-Darwin-was-no-heroic-genius-say-scientists.html
The lone wolf genius is a myth, but one that we seem very attached too. I liked reading this more anthropological take on it, though.
ReplyDeleteMike Aben there have existed lone wolf geniuses, to varying degrees. Srinivasa Ramanujan is an example.
ReplyDeleteWhile they might not be as common as some people believe, they nevertheless exist.
David Westebbe Good counter example, though even he got better as he began getting the support of those around him.
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