A recent editorial in the New York Times by John Horgan asks “will there ever be another Einstein?” In the article, James Gleick (author of the Richard Feynman biography “Genius“) provides one answer why the answer is “no.” From the Times article, Horgan reports Gleick’s view that “there are so many brilliant physicists alive today that it has become harder for any individual to stand apart from the pack.” “In other words,” say Horgan, “our perception of Einstein as a towering figure is, well, relative.”

Horgan goes on to add his own “corollary” to support why Einstein was the last of his kind: namely, the decline of government funding and number of new American PhD’s. However, I think Horgan should have spent more time following Gleick’s reasoning and done some basic homework on evolutionary biology. Had he done so, he would have come across a wonderful evolutionary argument for such phenomena put forth by one of my own personal heros, Stephan Jay Gould.

Gould, an avid student of America’s favorite pastime, baseball, applied evolutionary theory to explain why we haven’t seen a 400 hitter since Ted Williams last accomplished the feat in 1941. Did hitters simply become “less talented” (due to any of a number of reasons, including “less funding” for training hitters, or an increased emphasis on turning out better pitchers)? No, Gould tells us, to understand why there are no more 400 hitters in baseball:

…you have to use the same perspective of considering the full range of variation, rather than our usual false way of just looking at a single thing moving through time… What you have to do is re-conceptualize the whole problem in terms of variation, that is the full house, the full range of variation.

When you do that, you realize the following: The average batting average has never changed. It’s always been around 260. It fluctuates back and forth, but it stays around 260. And that’s not an absolute measure like running a mile or throwing a javelin; 260 is a balance between hitting and pitching. The fact that it’s stayed 260 only shows that the balance has been maintained. I say it’s been maintained as everyone has gotten better. Hitting’s gotten better. Pitching’s gotten better. Everything’s gotten better. The balance remains the same. Now as everything gets better, the variation shrinks. That’s all that happens. There’s a right wall of human limits based on how tall we are and our musculature. Nobody’s ever going to hit a ball a mile or pitch it 200 miles an hour.

Ty Cobb was standing right next to the right wall in 1910, but the average level of play was so much worse, he was so much better than the average that his hitting could be measured as 420. Today, everybody’s gotten enormously better. Wade Boggs a few years ago, Tony Gwyn today. They’re standing in the same place Ty Cobb was, an inch from the wall. The best players are always there, but everyone is so much better now that the average has moved right next to them. So their performance, which is equal to Cobb’s, is now measured as three forty or three fifty. So, in other words, the disappearance of 400 hitting paradoxically is measuring the general improvement of play and not as we always thought the exact opposite of the disappearance of batting skills. But you’ve got to have that full house perspective.

Sorry Mr. Horgan. While we’d all love to see government increases in spending for physics research and training new PhDs, to understand why “Einstein Has Left the Building,” maybe you just need to adopt a perspective Stephen Jay Gould and other evolutionary biologists have known for a long time. It may be, as Gould says, “we’ve hit a right wall in terms of accessible styles and since we demand innovation as a criterion of genius, there may not be more innovative styles to be found.” As incredulous as it may sound, the majority of today’s physicists may in fact be every bit as talented as dear old Albert (Einstein). In other words, to understand why we’ll never see another “Einstein,” you simply need to re-conceptualize the problem in terms of the full house.

(Oh, and while extrapolating evolutionary theory to the business realm is always fraught with risk — i.e., economics defined as the “dismal science” — this same analysis equally applies to why we will never see another Amazon, the classic example of first mover advantage.)

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