The Difficulty of Discovery (Where Have All The Geniuses Gone?)

Last night, in the State of the Union, President Obama emphasized the importance of innovation in "winning the future." It's clear that he wants to usher in a golden era of American ingenuity, to unleash the talent of everyone. But here's a question that I couldn't stop thinking about during the speech: What if we've become less talented? Ingenuity, after all, depends on geniuses. But what if we have fewer geniuses? You see, earlier in the day, I'd read Gideon Rachman's Financial Times column on the dearth of "great thinkers" in the 21st century, in which he uses a recent Foreign Policy list of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" as a point of comparison with the past:

Once you start the list-making exercise, it is difficult to avoid the impression that we are living in a trivial age.

The Foreign Policy list for 2010, it has to be said, is slightly odd since the magazine’s top 10 thinkers are all more famous as doers. In joint first place come Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for their philanthropic efforts. Then come the likes of Barack Obama (at number three), Celso Amorim, the Brazilian foreign minister (sixth), and David Petraeus, the American general and also, apparently, the world’s eighth most significant thinker. It is not until you get down to number 12 on the list that you find somebody who is more famous for thinking than doing – Nouriel Roubini, the economist.

But, as the list goes on, genuine intellectuals begin to dominate. There are economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, journalists (Christopher Hitchens), philosophers (Martha Nussbaum), political scientists (Michael Mandelbaum), novelists (Maria Vargas Llosa) and theologians (Abdolkarim Soroush). Despite an inevitable bias to the English-speaking world, there are representatives from every continent including Hu Shuli, a Chinese editor, and Jacques Attali, carrying the banner for French intellectuals.

It is an impressive group of people. But now compare it with a similar list that could have been compiled 150 years ago. The 1861 rankings could have started with Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill – On the Origin of Species and On Liberty were both published in 1859. Then you could include Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. And that was just the people living in and around London. In Russia, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were both at work, although neither had yet published their greatest novels.

Even if, like Foreign Policy, you have a preference for politicians, the contrast between the giants of yesteryear and the relative pygmies of today is alarming. In 1861 the list would have included Lincoln, Gladstone, Bismarck and Garibaldi. Their modern equivalents would be Mr Obama, Nick Clegg, Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi.

Still, perhaps 1861 was a freak? So let us repeat the exercise, and go back to the year when the second world war broke out. A list of significant intellectuals alive in 1939 would have included Einstein, Keynes, TS Eliot, Picasso, Freud, Gandhi, Orwell, Churchill, Hayek, Sartre.

Rachman acknowledges that he's probably being a bit unfair on contemporary thinkers. He proposes various explanations for this lack of geniuses, from the need for historical distance (perhaps Hitchens really is our Orwell) to the possibility that "familiarity breeeds contempt." (Hitchens would seem more like Orwell if he weren't so overexposed.) Personally, I'm most convinced by an alternative explanation, which is that our modern problems have gotten so hard - so damn intractable, complicated and multi-disciplinary - that we can no longer solve them by ourselves. The first piece of evidence suggesting that the difficulty of problems is increasing comes from historiometric data on the "peak age of creativity." It turns out that the peak age has been getting older for the past several hundred years. Dean Simonton, for instance, has shown that while Leonardo Da Vinci might have benefited from tackling the problems of medieval science in his mid-20s, the ideal age for modern scientists is closer to 40. Why? Because it takes longer to learn the field, to know enough to create new knowledge. Ben Jones, a professor at Kellogg, has found a similar trend:

Great achievements in knowledge are produced by older innovators today than they were a century ago. Using data on Nobel Prize winners and great inventors, I find that the mean age at which noted innovations are produced has increased by 6 years over the 20th Century. I estimate shifts in life-cycle productivity and show that innovators have become especially unproductive at younger ages.

But the complexity of our 21st century problems (clean coal, hydrogen cars, everything in neuroscience, string theory, etc.) has not just led to a postponement in peak creativity. It has also lessened the importance of the individual. Along with Stefan Wuchty and Brian Uzzi, Jones has found that teams have become a far more important part of intellectual production. By analyzing 19.9 million papers produced in the last fifty years (and 2.1 million patents), the Northwestern researchers were able to show that teamwork is a defining trend of modern research:

In sciences and engineering, 99.4% of the 171 subfields have seen increased teamwork. Meanwhile, 100% of the 54 subfields in the social sciences, 88.9%of the 27 subfields in the humanities, and 100% of the 36 subfields in patenting have seen increased teamwork.

Furthermore, this shift is even more pronounced among influential papers: While the most cited studies in a field used to be the product of a lone genius – think of Einstein or Darwin - Jones, et. al. have demonstrated that the best research now emerges from groups. It doesn’t matter if the researchers are studying particle physics or human genetics: science papers produced by multiple authors receive more than twice as many citations as those authored by individuals. This trend was even more apparent when it came to “home run papers” - those publications with at least 1000 citations - which were more than six times as likely to come from teams of scientists.

I think this research helps explain why the era of the lone genius is coming to an end. If our current lists of global thinkers seem paltry, it's because the best thinkers no longer exist by themselves, toiling away in a vacuum. Instead, they require the constant feedback and knowledge of others. We live in a world of such complexity that our problems increasingly exceed the possibilities of the individual mind. Collaboration is no longer an option.

PS. Noah Gray, an editor at Nature, sees the 21st century importance of scientific teams as a "return to our ancestral roots of socialized problem-solving." It's an intriguing possibility: Perhaps the era of the lone genius was merely an historical blip, an anomaly in the great span of human problem-solving.