What The Label Of ‘Genius’ Tells Us About Our Society

IRA FLATOW: Hi, this is Ira Flatow, and you’re listening to Science Friday.

[THEME MUSIC]

Today on the show, how to define genius.

HELEN LEWIS: People will say to me, but some people are just smarter than other people. That’s what geniuses are. And actually, that’s really not how we award the label.

IRA FLATOW: What makes someone a genius? Are they the smartest, most creative, most innovative people? How about those with the highest IQ? Well, my next guest argues that who we consider a genius tells us much more about what we value as a society than any objective measure of brilliance. And without a compelling or quirky life story, you’re unlikely to be elevated to the level of genius.

Joining me now to explore the complicated and coveted status of genius is my guest, Helen Lewis, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of the book The Genius Myth– A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. Welcome to Science Friday.

HELEN LEWIS: Thank you very much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Now, anybody who starts a book with “a curious history of a dangerous idea,” I got to ask, what do you mean, a dangerous idea?

HELEN LEWIS: Well, I think it’s something that people get wrong, don’t they? I mean, I’ve been having lots of conversations around this book where people will say to me, but some people are just smarter than other people. That’s what geniuses are. And actually, that’s really not how we award the label. It usually goes to somebody who encapsulates some quality that we like, or we find that their life story is a kind of parable.

So somebody like Stephen Hawking would be a good example. There are lots of physicists of his generation with equivalent achievements, but he’s the one who became a kind of pop culture celebrity. He’s the one who got to be in The Simpsons because people found his personal story so inspiring.

So he had ALS, a progressive form of muscular dystrophy, and ended up in a wheelchair. And people found that idea that somebody’s brain was still active, even as their body was failing them, just quite profoundly moving. And so he became this different figure within science. Then, as I say, any other– you know, Roger Penrose or anybody else of the same generation whose work on paper was just as good.

IRA FLATOW: Mhm. Or Elon Musk, as you start your book with.

HELEN LEWIS: Yeah, I felt I had to start with Elon Musk because everybody was having this big argument about him at the time. And actually, I think what happened to him at DOGE, the Department for Government Efficiency, really, it kind of shows what the argument that I was trying to make in the book, which is that there was a feeling among people who were very smart at coding and engineering that every problem was a coding problem, as if you just throw more computing power at a problem and that solves it.

And actually– I mean, you will know this as well as me, I’m sure– political problems are often very knotty, simply because they involve people. And so I think Elon Musk went into DOGE thinking, here’s me and my crack team of smart 21-year-olds, and we’re going to look at the code base of the US government, clean it up, and then that will improve things. And look what has happened. He’s got nowhere near the $2 trillion of savings that he promised.

And actually, most of the people involved in that, including him, have come out of it feeling quite bruised and kind of with a sense of, why didn’t this work? And to me, that’s the absolute paradigm of, you throw a load of, quote unquote, “geniuses” at a problem, and guess what– the problem is a bit more difficult than perhaps the people involved realized, because they value one type of intelligence and one type of genius.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, so they are really good at very narrow things, but the social consequences or social graces might be lacking.

HELEN LEWIS: Right. And politics is the art of making people do what you want, or convincing them that ideas that you have were things that they’ve always believed themselves anyway. It’s fundamentally about people skills.

IRA FLATOW: Mhm. Have we lost the idea, then, of political genius, someone who is so smart, change the paradigm and everybody’s excited about that person?

HELEN LEWIS: Well, there are different types of genius. I think politics is a place where you can make a version of what we would have once called great man theory, that there are certain individuals who really do change the course of history. But science, I think, is very different to that.

So one of the things I found during my research, which was most mind blowing, is this 1922 paper called “Are Inventions Inevitable?” And it goes through– it’s now quite a famous paper– goes through all of the things that got invented basically around the same time. And thinkers like Steven Johnson and Malcolm Gladwell I kind of think are slightly obsessed with this paper because it overturns everything you think about how scientific discoveries happen.

It suggests instead that they’re kind of– when the preconditions of them have been met, somebody will get there. Three people discovered nitrogen in the air in the same year. That was just kind of ready to happen, essentially.

IRA FLATOW: Right. Ideas happen. I’m thinking of Isaac Newton and calculus. He wasn’t the only one.

HELEN LEWIS: Oh, I mean, I love Isaac Newton because he’s such a fantastic historical figure. But yeah, [INAUDIBLE].

IRA FLATOW: Talk about genius, you know?

HELEN LEWIS: And hailed as a genius. And what’s really interesting about him is– well, two things I think are fascinating from his story. One is the, obviously, discovery of gravity. Incredible breakthrough in science. Brilliant. But that wasn’t what he spent most of his life doing. He spent most of his life obsessed with alchemy, trying to turn base metals into gold, and with biblical chronology, i.e. working out exactly when events in the Bible could have happened historically.

So he spent a lot of time going down dead ends. And then the other thing is, as you mentioned, one of the things he’s most famous for now is the simultaneous discovery of calculus and spending many, many years trying to destroy his rival’s reputation and make sure that he got the credit for it. And you do find that story in a lot of self-proclaimed geniuses, that they want it, they go after it. They’re not very willing to share the limelight.

IRA FLATOW: Boy, is that true. I mean, as a science journalist, I could name a couple of names there. But– [LAUGHS]

HELEN LEWIS: Well, I would love it if you did, but I think it’s really fascinating. I talked to Walter Isaacson a while ago, and his book career is fascinating to me because obviously he’s written biographies of da Vinci, of Einstein, and Steve Jobs lately, and Elon Musk. He also wrote a book about Jennifer Doudna, of gene editing, of CRISPR. And that in which has potential to be an incredibly transformative technology.

But she does not have that same aura. She has not been so enthusiastically playing the role of the great sage delivering a new kind of era for humankind. And I think that’s very notable.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, and that brings up a topic about women in science. And I think you might consider her to be a genius type for coming up with her work, but you don’t historically hear the, quote, “label of genius” given to many women over the centuries. Right?

HELEN LEWIS: I think it’s very notable. I think there’s obviously, particularly historically, there are social factors. One of the things that really stood out to me in my research was that there was a brilliant female physicist of the late 19th century and early 20th century called Hertha Ayrton. And she did great work in arc lights and lots of other stuff that was very innovative at the time. She won the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society, but she couldn’t join the Royal Society. They only admitted women in the 1940s.

IRA FLATOW: Madame Curie couldn’t get into–

HELEN LEWIS: Right. She only got her–

IRA FLATOW: –the society’s–

HELEN LEWIS: –professorship after she essentially inherited it from Pierre, her late husband. That’s somebody who won two Nobel prizes in different disciplines, like one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

One of the things I wanted to talk about is the role of collaboration. And I think we often downplay the roles of those societies and of universities. But scientists themselves, through history, have been really well aware of what it means to be at the edge– you need to what everybody else is doing at the edge of the field. You need to know where the interesting work is being done.

And so excluding women– Black Americans were very often locked out of them, working class people locked out of them, Jewish people locked out of the Ivy League in the beginning of the 20th century– there have been large swathes of Americans who have not been able to access the resources that they needed to fully develop their talents.

IRA FLATOW: Why do you think the idea of male genius is so persistent? I mean, women have been excluded from science for so many centuries. Why even now?

HELEN LEWIS: I mean, I think it was always framed as the fact that women weren’t as brilliant, or their brains weren’t up to it. And I think it was the other way around, actually. It was a fear of competition. It was a fear that they could compete. And you see that. You know, there was lots of discussion at the end of the 19th century about the fact that women shouldn’t be admitted to universities because they didn’t really have the brains for it.

Now we have the opposite problem, that actually lots of courses are dominated at undergraduate and even taught graduate level by women. So that clearly wasn’t a problem. And there’s another thing, too, which I think hero worship really comes into it. When you’re talking about people being hailed as geniuses, you’re kind of really talking often about hero worship.

And we know, for example, that women are quite happy to read books by both genders; men are quite reluctant read books written by women. And I think there’s something slightly emasculating for some men. They feel that being– kind of adoring a woman would somehow be kind of humbling to them.

IRA FLATOW: After the break, how Albert Einstein became synonymous with the word “genius.”

HELEN LEWIS: He turned into a kind of public intellectual and celebrity, and he was obviously comfortable with that role.

IRA FLATOW: Don’t go away.

So speaking of hero worship, let’s talk about Albert Einstein for a moment, because he is the iconic genius. His wild hair that’s become the symbol of somebody who’s a genius– what was it about him and the age he lived in that made him so much that icon of geniusness?

HELEN LEWIS: I mean, I would start by saying that– I think people often, when they think about the book, assume that it’s a kind of brutal debunking, of me taking a lot of great men down at the knees. And that’s not true at all. I’m trying to make the picture more complicated and broader. And Einstein is a good example of this, because he is undoubtedly one of the greatest scientists ever; just came up with incredible breakthroughs. He just fundamentally changed physics.

But there’s lots of interesting things about him. He wasn’t a particularly incredible student at university. Part of the legend is that he was working in a patent office when he made his breakthroughs because he couldn’t get an academic job. But the other thing is that he turned into a kind of public intellectual and celebrity, and he was obviously comfortable with that role.

He speculated about the existence of God. He took a stance on nuclear weapons. Obviously, as a refugee from Europe to America, as a Jewish refugee, he had very strong opinions on the politics of the Second World War. All of those things meant that he was essentially a sage.

By the time that he died, he was a celebrity, and he was the one that people had on T-shirts and they would make pilgrimages to see him. He was no longer at the forefront of where the edge of physics research was, he was a kind of elder statesman of the entire field. And it’s a slightly different role.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. So this was about his persona besides his achievements, then.

HELEN LEWIS: But also something about– you mentioned that the wild hair and the famous picture with his tongue stuck out. That’s–

IRA FLATOW: Central casting in Hollywood.

HELEN LEWIS: Well, but where does that idea come from? Because that’s not an idea that people had in the 1600s of what it meant to be a genius. But the idea of that kind of childlike wonder of the genius is really an idea that kind of fully blossoms in the 18th century with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The idea that actually what’s most pure in children is nature, and we corrupt it by schooling them, drilling them in times tables, and whatever else it might be.

And since then, there’s been a really high premium on that kind of– the idea of the genius is the free spirit that comes along in a couple of different ways, one of which I have a very conflicted relationship, which was the idea of the heretic. There are so many stories about the one person in science standing up to the establishment that doesn’t get it. So Ignaz Semmelweis and the germ theory of disease, or Galileo and the heliocentric universe, and those stories are often a little bit more complicated.

And then you have stories like someone like Freeman Dyson, undoubtedly a very brilliant mind, but by the end of his life, a climate change denier. And he wrote an essay called The Scientist as Rebel, and I think got sucked into this idea that if everyone was telling him it was wrong, then wasn’t that more proof that actually he was a free thinker and it was right? And that, unfortunately, you can draw a direct line from that, I think, to the kind of heterodox podcast sphere where anything that the establishment says, by definition, is probably flawed and faulty, and the most fringe ideas are therefore the most interesting, and shouldn’t we look into them.

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday from WNYC studios. Let’s talk a bit about– I remember when I grew up– that’s how old I am– when people used to talk about the role of IQ all the time. Very important. Your kids, we have to measure his or her IQ. You write that members of high IQ societies are not typically the most successful people in society. Why is that?

HELEN LEWIS: Well, I’ve got bad news for you if you were enjoying a brief respite from the IQ discourse because it’s really come roaring back. I mean, to get back to Elon Musk, one of many people in Silicon Valley who are really obsessed with IQ. The people in the early 20th century were interested in it, because they feel that there are certain kinds of superior people, maybe even superior races.

So I think IQ discourse is coming back. But yes, one of the things I find most joyful– I’m a political journalist by background, so I spent a lot of time covering fringe political parties which schism with delightful frequency, right, because the stakes are quite low. No one’s actually ever going to be in power over everything, so all they have, really, are their principles. And there’s something similar that happens in the ultra-high IQ society.

So the one people might have heard of is Mensa, and that takes the top 1% to 2% of the population. But there are ones that are way, way, way beyond that. And they do become, I won’t say like bald men fighting over a comb, but they become kind of incredibly smart people fighting over the minutes of a meeting. Just their propensity for people to have these dramatic fallings out. And also get into huge arguments about who’s the smartest person is, even within this coterie of very smart people. People who really value their smartness often are very attached to it.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Should we retire the word “genius,” you think, altogether?

HELEN LEWIS: I don’t think we ever will. So I think my campaign against it wouldn’t make any difference, even if I had it. I think we do want a word for something that is kind of extraordinary and for somebody that we maybe even admire, or maybe just we don’t feel is kind of entirely human, right? We almost don’t how they did it.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. How do we celebrate, then, people who have done truly incredible and society-positive things?

HELEN LEWIS: I think it’s a harder question than that, which is how do we celebrate teams?

IRA FLATOW: Teams.

HELEN LEWIS: I think we have a model for celebrating individual scientists. Notoriously, the Nobels in the sciences can go to a maximum of three people. And there’s a lot of quite low-level disgruntlement with that because inevitably it means that some people glom on to a discovery, like William Shockley with the transistor, which I write about in the book. Or sometimes you get a situation in which it’s fairly arbitrary who gets their name on the plaque and who doesn’t.

I mean, I was just thinking about how much– I don’t know if you liked it, but I really liked the film Oppenheimer.

IRA FLATOW: Yes. Yes, I did.

HELEN LEWIS: Because it was a very rare example of– that film is not– Oppenheimer didn’t make those breakthroughs himself. Right?

IRA FLATOW: Right.

HELEN LEWIS: His genius, if you want to call it that, was to bring together Enrico Fermi or Richard Feynman, these big egos, these awkward personalities, and put them together in a desert and get them to do their best work as a team. And that we just very rarely talk about that or have a way to celebrate that.

IRA FLATOW: We were talking about Elon Musk. And I think as a society, we’re much more likely now to hold people accountable for bad behavior, even if we review and view them as geniuses. And people seemed genuinely delighted to see Elon Musk make a fool of himself on the national stage, and then his genius card gets revoked, even briefly. Is this the genius myth fading or changing? Or how do you look at that?

HELEN LEWIS: Well, I was trying to work out, and I never quite worked out the perfect way to say it, but the idea that calling someone a genius is often a way of having an argument that a society wants to have. You’re right that his genius card has been revoked, which is sort of weird, when you think about it. There’s nothing about what he’s done with the federal government that makes the achievements of Tesla or SpaceX or the Boring Company anything different from what they were before.

I think people on the left think that it retrospectively debunks him and everything else he’s done. And I don’t feel like that. I feel like he has made some really interesting and significant contributions to American scientific life. But I think his problem was, it was grandiosity.

He kind of came in like he was a sort of stunt motorcyclist, going like, hey, stand back, losers, and watch this. I’m going to be amazing. And then if that person then falls into a lake of custard, that is inevitably quite funny. And so I think his own arrogance brought that down on him, really.

IRA FLATOW: You see this often, though, in people who’ve won Nobel prizes and are labeled as geniuses. Suddenly they think they’re a genius in a field that they nothing about.

HELEN LEWIS: Yeah, and they get treated like that. It happened to Thomas Edison, who’s sort of treated as a kind of sage in his later life when his kind of creative juice had slightly run out. And I think people get turned into a kind of 360-degree wise man– and it usually is a man. Why would somebody who is a brilliant chemist necessarily have incredibly good views on politics any more than a politician would be able to make a breakthrough in organic chemistry?

IRA FLATOW: Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

HELEN LEWIS: Oh, well, thank you for talking to me. The history of science is always such a pleasure to talk about because it’s filled with so many big characters who you do not necessarily want to spend much time with in real life, are fun to spend time with on the page.

IRA FLATOW: I second that. Helen Lewis, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the book, The Genius Myth– The Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. We didn’t have time to get into all of the fascinating stories of genius in the book. So if you want to read more about Thomas Edison’s story, go to sciencefriday.com/genius-myth.

Hey, thanks for listening. This episode was produced by Shoshannah Buxbaum. See you next time. I’m Ira Flatow.

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