“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” - Stephen Jay Gould

Maybe inspired by this quote?

Eh. This kinda breezes over what made Einstein into Einstein.

Access to education, a network of peers doing cutting edge research, and a journal of record to publish into was what separated Einstein from the assorted Very Smart Guys around the world.

Consider, as a counterpoint Srinivasa Ramanujan, a genius mathematician who pioneered whole fields of number theory before his death at the age of 32. He is remembered today primarily in his correspondence with a Cambridge University professor, G. H. Hardy. and the notebooks of mathematical proofs he had assembled in his spare time.

What made Ramanujan significant was not merely his genius but his access to the academic record. In the modern era, we have dramatically expanded the reach of academic institutions. So even if you are born in a small town to totally unknown parents living provincial existences, you can access universities more easily now than before.

I might say that the real question is how all this mental horsepower is being used. The modern Einstein likely isn’t lost on a deserted road shuttling around firewood. S/he is more likely optimizing some algorithm to make the next great shitcoin or tunning the performance of the graphics rendering for the new Marvel movie.

Being good at something isnt determined at birth.