You know, whether right or wrong in this case, I think you're on to something. As a culture, we do like to focus on singletons - we like the idea of lone geniuses toiling away and changing the world and skip over the amount of team-work/collaboration that goes into real advances.
So I wonder: is this specific to our culture or is a multi-cultural thing? If it is multi-cultural, then an explanation might be that hyper-focus on individual accomplishment was a more accurate perspective in our hunter-gatherer days; fewer people means that each person has a bigger relative impact.
Well there's a very obvious reason for that: we want to learn from the best. Why would you pick someone which is only good, or anything else but the best, most creative, most inspiring? Surely having an ensemble of good performers is nice, but the 'genius' by consensus is who anyone would wish to learn foremost.
I do have a specific opinion on what it means to learn form someone. People often overreach and obsess with details from the lives of those, when in reality learning from Einstein is as simple as reading what he wrote and the way he described his theories. This goes for many other geniuses -- they are geniuses in their fields, and we shouldn't expect everything they did to be right.
"...learning from Einstein is as simple as reading what he wrote and the way he described his theories."
"If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicist about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds."
I was thinking something quite similar few hours ago. It seems people like to praise a leader (my shallow tribal interpretation) and not focus on the subtle intricacies of what really happened in details; unless they develop a taste for precision and systems.
So I wonder: is this specific to our culture or is a multi-cultural thing? If it is multi-cultural, then an explanation might be that hyper-focus on individual accomplishment was a more accurate perspective in our hunter-gatherer days; fewer people means that each person has a bigger relative impact.