Inventive Genes

Magazines like Wired or Time celebrate and hype the inventive individual: the brilliant scientist alone in their lab, the sole inventor tinkering in their garage, or intrepid solo explorer climbing out of their craft. They certainly make nice glossy pictures, looking thoughtful, posed against a backdrop of colored liquids or blinking screens. We want to admire our modern equivalents of Prometheus, da Vinci, or Archimedes.

But it is largely romantic bunk. Most progress is accretion: hundreds or thousands of small advances make bigger things possible. Darwin needed then-new geological information and theories of fecundity on which to base his observations and insights. Watson and Crick, of DNA fame, based their insight on solid information from structural and biochemical studies. Brilliant scientists, certainly, but the adulation heaped on the individuals inevitably reduces the appreciation for the process and the contributions of others.

Just as there is no designer for the honeycomb or architect for the ant hill, save the Original, exploration is in the human DNA. Creation is a community effort, brought forth by the midwife chosen by timing, coincidence, and luck. On a related note, the single individual credited with the idea or advance is often not the first to have made the observation. Instead, it's as though the community waits for the right representative, the right salesperson perhaps, before the idea is accepted.