Darwin & the Power of Cumulative Learning
- awalker187
- Oct 15
- 5 min read
Darwin was not born a genius.
In his book, Letters to a Young Scientist, the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson argued that Darwin probably had an IQ in the 130 range.
He was not a genius student.
He dropped out of medical school, before completing a Bachelor of Arts degree.
In his letters he looked back at his natural abilities saying, “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men … my power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited … my memory is extensive, yet hazy … so poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry.”
There was no spark of genius when he saw the finches of the Galapagos.
Darwin incorrectly identified a number of them and it took other people to recognise that he'd discovered a series of finch species.
And his eight years studying barnacles in relative obscurity was not the career move of a genius.
“I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before.” - Charles Darwin
Then in 1859, he published On the Origins of Species, introduced the concept of evolution, and changed how we think of the world and how we fit in it forever.
It was a work of genius.
When you visualise Darwin you think of a severe old man with a big bushy white beard.
We see him that way, because that’s how he looked when his book was published.
He was 50 years old.
It’s not the story we’ve grown to expect for geniuses and people who change the world.
We imagine they are born startlingly different to us.
But like Darwin geniuses are usually made.
And they get there through the sustained accumulation of effort.
“I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures … I divide the world into the learners and the nonlearners.” - Benjamin Barber
Cumulative learning
Take two people: Charlie and Charles.
Both have the same natural ability.
Both have the same education and the same qualifications.
And they both start work at the age of 25 starting their careers on 100 units of capability.
But Charlie and Charles do differ in the way they think.
Charlie has a fixed mindset.
After finishing his education, he does his job competently, doing what he’s asked and gradually improving.
He grows 1% a year.
Charles has a growth mindset.
He loves to learn, always questioning things and looking for new opportunities to solve.
He grows 5% a year.
By the time he’s 50 Charlie has developed 128 units of capability.
Charles on the other hand now has a massive advantage because of the power of compound growth
He’s wracked up 338 units of capability.
He’s now 3x more effective.
This is how Charles Darwin excelled.
“Many growth-mindset people didn’t even plan to go to the top. They got there as a result of doing what they love. It’s ironic: The top is where the fixed-mindset people hunger to be, but it’s where many growth-mindset people arrive as a by-product of their enthusiasm for what they do.” - Carol Dweck
Darwin’s winning mindset
Darwin epitomised the traits of someone with a growth mindset.
He had a thirst for learning.
He read widely, with a personal library of 1480 books, annotating 730 of them with research notes.
He actively sought opportunities to expand his knowledge.
He’s most famous for the five years spent navigating the world on the HMS Beagle.
But he also pursued a wide variety of subjects, such as learning taxidermy and biology at the expense of his medical studies, and then studying entomology, natural theology and geology while obtaining his bachelors degree.
He continued to constantly ask questions.
He built an extensive correspondence network of 231 subject experts and wrote thousands of letters to people as far afield as South Africa, the Azores, the US, Jamaica and Norway.
“My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts.”
He embraced feedback, actively seeking out and considering every viewpoint that contradicted his own.
“I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favourable ones.”
“I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”
It was Darwin’s growth mindset and his compound effort that enabled him to make his great breakthrough.
“There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime’s learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that’s why they’re the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything.” - Chuck Yaeger (The first person to break the sound barrier)
Late blooming
Late breakthroughs are not the exception.
You can see this in the success rate of startup founders.
Again you’d think that it’s a young person’s game because they are the ones that get the coverage.
Across a decade of TechCrunch awards, the average age of the founders was just 31.*
But research on the effectiveness of startup founders discovered that the ideal age to start a business is in the mid-forties.
“Among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, we find that the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old.”*
And one reason for the success of this older cohort is the same cumulative learning process.
The people that continue to learn and grow are the ones that have a huge advantage when they put that hard won knowledge into action.
“It’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.” - Carol Dweck
“With such moderate abilities as I possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important points.” - Charles Darwin
* Azoulay, P., Jones, B., J. Kim, D., Miranda, J., “Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45”, Harvard Business Review (2018)
