Lately, my wife and I have been enjoying Eureka. In spite of its many flaws, it’s a campy-yet-adorable guilty pleasure. It’s like watching old Star Trek TNG episodes crossed with a soap opera. The show isn’t meant to be taken too seriously, but there’s something that bugs me: the reinforcement of a myth about inventors.
Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind.
That’s from an engaging interview with Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson in Wired Magazine and it sets fire to that myth. I’ve enjoyed these two authors for years now, so finding them in a single interview was a joy (thanks BoingBoing).
Highlights
Kelly: It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another.
Johnson: Also, there’s a related myth—that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive, from the competitive pressures of a market society. If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
Popular wisdom is quaint and generally wrong, but that’s not much of a surprise, right? I’ve listened to James Burke say stuff like this for decades. But there’s an additional explanation that I hadn’t considered:
Kelly: In part, that’s because ideas that leap too far ahead are almost never implemented—they aren’t even valuable. People can absorb only one advance, one small hop, at a time. Gregor Mendel’s ideas about genetics, for example: He formulated them in 1865, but they were ignored for 35 years because they were too advanced. Nobody could incorporate them. Then, when the collective mind was ready and his idea was only one hop away, three different scientists independently rediscovered his work within roughly a year of one another.
Johnson: Charles Babbage is another great case study. His “analytical engine,” which he started designing in the 1830s, was an incredibly detailed vision of what would become the modern computer, with a CPU, RAM, and so on. But it couldn’t possibly have been built at the time, and his ideas had to be rediscovered a hundred years later.
That’s an example that’s easier to wrap my head around. A heavy, mechanical computer was simply not how that bit of logic-tech was going to flourish. But at least we got steampunk out of it.
Johnson: And for wastes of time and resources. If you knew nothing about the Internet and were trying to figure it out from the data, you would reasonably conclude that it was designed for the transmission of spam and porn. And yet at the same time, there’s more amazing stuff available to us than ever before, thanks to the Internet.
I’ll just keep telling myself that. Sadly, he’s omitted the importance of adorable kittens, YouTube screeds, and celebrity mugshots. If this has piqued your interest, read the whole thing and enjoy.
