The UK: Island of Geniuses








Here’s my own abbreviated list of major British scientific achievements:

Newton   (physics, calculus, optics)

Darwin (natural and sexual selection)

Michael Faraday (electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis)

Ernest Rutherford (NZ of English ancestry, nuclear physics)

James Clerk Maxwell (physics, electromagnetism)

Charles Lyell (geology)

Arthur Eddington (astrophysics)

Francis Galton (HBD)

Alan Turing (computer language)

Watson & Crick (DNA)

WD Hamilton (Neo-Darwinism, inclusive fitness)




13 thoughts on “The UK: Island of Geniuses

  1. Darwin never came up with Natural Selection, supposedly even Christian writers were talking about it years before him. He did popularise it I guess.

  2. When it comes to scientific geniuses, it’s arguable that the British win, hands down. But when it comes to literary geniuses, they face some pretty stiff competition from the French, the Russians, the Italians, the Germans, and even the Spanish. And when it comes to music, painting & sculpture? England is relatively speaking, a backwater. Where is the British Mozart, or the British Chardin, or the British Donatello?

    • The Germans might be able to hold their own in physics, but when it comes to evo-bio sciences, the British win hands down.

      I’d say in classical music the Germans win hands down. Painting, Southern Europe.

    • Late response, but in classical music, Elgar and Purcell are OK. True, they ain’t the equal of Mozart, Bach or Beethoven, but no-one is. Sculpture weak, but in art we have Hayman, Gainsborough and Reynolds.
      As for England facing tough contest in literature from the French, Italians, Spanish and Germans, can you name some names? Only the Russians come close…

    • Nonsense. England has (over a millennium) as strong a record in Composition as either Germany France or Italy. Mozart is seriously over rated in any event. How about William Crotch or (his pupil) Cipriani Potter or S.S. Wesley or even the much and unfairly maligned Henry Bishop to name a few better composers more or less contemporary with Mozart. Or how about Charles Dibdin. Did Mozart ever write anything as affecting (and English) as Tom Bowling?

      Having read a fair amount of French and Russian literature the idea that those countries ever produced writers of the calibre of Milton or Shakespeare, Byron or Keats is laughable.

      The best Philosophers are also British (Hume Hobbes Locke, Bacon – to name a few).

      I sense a certain (hand-me-down) ethno-masochism from vinteuil9


    Why? Even with mass immigration, most people still practice selective breeding. Geniuses are no more likely to marry morons than before. They are probably less likely, as urbanization and technological development have led all the smart people to cluster in a handful of places (including smart immigrants). The presence of dumb people a few neighborhoods over won’t make the smart people vanish. Granted, they are an expensive burden, but that’s a separate issue. I think most people have methods of avoiding the prole areas, so their presence is almost irrelevant in the minds of most.

  4. Robert Recorde – Inventor of the mathematical equation, the = sign and the + sign. Foundation of algebra with John Dee founder of the “English” school of mathematics. Both were Welsh and Recorde taught in Scotland for a while.

    Alfred Wallace should go on any list that includes Darwin.

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