“But is groupthink the best way to create really new science? Risking heresy, I hereby dissent. I believe the creative process usually unfolds in a very different way. It arises and for a while germinates in a solitary brain. It commences as an idea and, equally important, the ambition of a single person who is prepared and strongly motivated to make discoveries in one domain of science or another. The successful innovator is favored by a fortunate combination of talent and circumstance, and is socially conditioned by family, friends, teachers, and mentors, and by stories of great scientists and their discoveries. He or she is sometimes driven, I will dare to suggest, by a passive-aggressive nature, and sometimes an anger against some part of society or problem in the world. There is also an introversion in the innovator that keeps him from team sports and social events. He dislikes authority, or at least being told what to do. He is not a leader in high school or college, nor is he likely to be pledged by social clubs. From an early age he is a dreamer, not a doer. His attention wanders easily. He likes to probe, to collect, to tinker. He is prone to fantasize. He is not inclined to focus. He will not be voted by his classmates most likely to succeed. … On the frontier of modern science, however, multiple skills are almost always needed to bring any new idea to fruition… whoever it takes for the project to succeed becomes a collaborator. … Innovator, creative collaborator, or facilitator: in the course of your successful career, you may well fill each of these roles at one time or another.”

-E.O. Wilson, “Letters to a Young Scientist”