- A child of well-connected parents who can putter around doing music until his 30s and then go on to work in public policy
- ... but of course this is because he "works like a maniac"
- Compares self to Darwin and Bach
- Needs a guru in some remote place in India to tell him basic truths about life.
Wow he really fucks it up too. Darwin didn’t die some obscure pauper. He was already pretty famous in scientific circles when the Origin of Species was published and by the time he died the theory of evolution was the prevailing theory by a longshot. He was as close to a house hold name as a living scientist could be in that age.
He was only “irrelevant” in the sense that an entire generation had taken his ideas and developed it to such an extent that he couldn’t keep up as a single human. Centuries of study in naturalism was recontextualized in the span of decades.