
Charles Darwin: Genius or Plodder? - sajid
http://www.genetics.org/content/183/3/773
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nyc111
> He was not particularly fast in his thinking nor was he mathematically
> gifted.

May I suggest that, the media tends to declare someone a genius if his work
cannot be understood by laymen. Physicists like Einstein are declared true
geniuses because the mathematics they use look mysterious and magical. But
anyone can understand Darwin's prose. Personally, I think they are all human
and by defining them as genius we deify them.

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whatshisface
> _the media tends to declare someone a genius if his work cannot be
> understood by laymen_

That's not particularly true. I don't think there is a single mathematician
whose papers are understandable to laypeople (by laypeople, I mean the average
person, who remembers some but not all of highschool math). What's really
going on here is that Einstein made a tremendous contribution to a tower that
was already quite tall, while Darwin's contribution was to the ground floor
where everybody could get on. The maths analogy to Darwin would be one of the
inventors of Algebra - evolution is taught to children right along with the
_foundations_ of math and physics.

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11235813213455
Not always understandable by Einstein itself, he got helped by his
mathematician friends, like Levi Civita

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nyc111
True. And also he got mathematical help from Marcel Grossmann. Poincare too
was doing work on the theory of relativity.

Also one of the selling points of relativity in the early days was the
difficulty of its math. I think it was Eddington who said that "only three
people understood General Relativity."

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8bitsrule
Not all the sciences have many really -famous- people.

Geology has developed a great deal in the past 2 centuries; not many
geologists are "stars". How many people can name those among the most
influential geologists?

Apart from Darwin, who most people wouldn't think of as a geologist! And yet
... [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-
stones/darwin-g...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-
stones/darwin-geologist-first-and-last/)

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kwhitefoot
Why not "Genius AND plodder".

Not everything has to happen at high speed.

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bytematic
I want Genius and Plodder on my gravestone

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rdlecler1
Certain people have an exceptional ability to communicate their thoughts and
ideas. Now imagine if someone didn’t have that same mental quickness, or
struggles to turn parallel thought process into serial form. Now assume that
work was not quantitative but more qualitative in nature. Seems obviously that
these people are all around us but it will be difficult to identify them as a
genius before their ideas are accepted. Maybe MRIs will help us better uncover
all of the various geniuses of the world so that we can take them a little
more seriously. Entrepreneurship is interesting in this regard because it’s
another way to potentially keep score.

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tristan_shatley
Evolution seems obvious today. But so do a lot of things that we've grown up
with.

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tzs
I understand the evidence and the virtually iron clad case for evolution and
so I know it happens and it is how we got here. Nevertheless, it remains
extremely non-obvious to me if I try to actually comprehend how it could
actually have happened.

Imagine some human male, just old enough to be capable of fathering a child.

Now imagine standing next to him his father, from when his father was just old
enough to be capable of fathering children.

Next to him, put his father, at that age, and so on. Go back to their earliest
male direct paternal ancestor for which it still makes sense to say it is male
(so a little ways past a billion years ago, when sexual reproduction
appeared).

Visualize that long line of organisms, each fathered by the one before it, and
father to the one after it. The only apparent differences between each
organism in that line and its father or child, even under a detailed internal
examination, are either very very minor or are cosmetic or size differences.

Yet if you take two organisms far apart in the line, you get massive
differences. On one end you have a human, and a good distance down the line
you've got something that swims around in the ocean, and differs drastically
from the human. Different number of heart chambers, something other than lungs
for breathing, and more.

Now go somewhere between those two, where you can find something that lives on
land, but uses four legs, not two legs and two arms.

It is not at all obvious how this is possible, because remember, to get from
that thing in the water to that thing on four legs, and from that thing on
four legs to us, the changes from father to son every step of the way have to
essentially be continuous.

Intuitively, that would seem to mean that between the four legged ancestor and
the two leg two arm ancestors there had to be many generations where the
individuals had two limbs that were somewhere between legs and arms. They
would be not as good at four legged things as "normal" four legged animals,
and not as good at arm things as "normal" armed animals. Similar argument for
every other aspect the differs significantly between them. And yet, despite
those disadvantages, everyone in line managed to make it at least long enough
to successfully reproduce [1].

It just seems that so many low probability sequential things had to happened
for this to work that I don't find it obvious that it is is possible, even
taking into account that this possible evolution space was being explored by a
huge number of organisms in parallel and taking into account that our end of
the line is not special from an understanding evolution viewpoint--it just
seems special to use because it is _our_ end.

It's essentially for me like geometry theorems in higher dimensional spaces. I
can understand their proofs and know they are true, but cannot find them
obvious the way 2D and 3D geometry can be.

[1] Which is kind of sobering, since I do not have kids, meaning that I
dropped the ball and ended a direct line of father/son descent going back over
a billion years.

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jwilbs
I think this is a great point that, for some reason, I can’t recall ever
seeing thoroughly addressed. (To be fair, I don’t work in the life sciences,
so cmiiw).

I definitely believe in evolution, but wonder if maybe something is missing,
especially when it comes to the sort of cross-species changes you’re
discussing.

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tristan_shatley
I understand your point, but the difficulty comprehending the continuous
change of species into species over billions a years is really something
humans have difficulty when it comes to anything that has such a slow rate of
change.

For example, it's very hard to imagine the grand canyon being carved out from
water eroding the earth every time it floods little by little. But you can
intuitively still get how that works. And I think the basic idea of natural
selection is pretty intuitive. Whatever can't survive doesn't reproduce. You
can imagine how that simple rule (of course it's more complicated than that)
could lead to life to spread out, and adapt to many different niches and take
all sorts of forms.

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zygotic12
Human or mammal?

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dang
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

~~~
zygotic12
Genius or Plodder?

