I'm floating in and out of the Darwin joint on NOVA, and I've noticed that Darwin sure had a lot of free time to stand around and collect all the dead birds et al he wanted, or to sail around the world. Of course, in looking him up online, it turns out he came from a wealthy family, his father being a doctor.
Malcom Gladwell wrote about about the same thing in Outliers and various articles, but I'm reminded that sometimes the luck of birth plays a big part in being a "genius." For instance, surely there were people as smart as Darwin and interested in natural science or some such, but couldn't afford to devote themselves to it. And then there were plenty of people who had a bunch of money, but didn't give fuck all about natural science. And so it took the perfect conflux of having money AND an interest in natural science to produce Darwin and, eventually, his theory of natural selection.
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