What Diamond says that really goes against the "heroic"
model of invention is that individual inventors are not really all that important. He
argues two things. First, he says that by far most famous inventors did not actually
invent something completely new. Instead, they tinkered with something old and improved
it. Second, he argues that if the famous inventors hadn't come around, someone else
would have made the same breakthrough. So he's saying that invention is a process that
is done by building in small steps, not by some genius having an inspiration and
creating some finished product right on the spot.
Diamond's
argument about the "mother of necessity" also takes some of the shine off of individual
inventors. He is saying that these are not people who invent something because they see
a need. They are not out to help humanity by solving some problem. Instead, they are
just playing around with technology, trying to devise something new just for fun,
almost. That takes away from their heroic image because it means that their discoveries
are way more random and way less heroic.
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