Luck, Intelligence and Copying

Mark Pagel suggests that innovation might be no more than random evolution of ideas (h/t nc links):

What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. But, these ideas, I think, are received with incredulity, because humans like to think of themselves as highly shrewd and intelligent and innovative people. But I think what we have to realize is that it's even possible that, as I say, the generative mechanisms we have for coming up with new ideas are no better than random.
And a really fascinating idea itself is to consider that even the great people in history whom we associate with great ideas might be no more than we expect by chance. I'll explain that. Einstein was once asked about his intelligence and he said, "I'm no more intelligent than the next guy. I'm just more curious." Now, we can grant Einstein that little indulgence, because we think he was a pretty clever guy.
But let's take him at his word and say, what does curiosity mean? Well, maybe curiosity means trying out all sorts of ideas in your mind. Maybe curiosity is a passion for trying out ideas. Maybe Einstein's ideas were just as random as everybody else's, but he kept persisting at them.
And if we say that everybody has some tiny probability of being the next Einstein, and we look at a billion people, there will be somebody who just by chance is the next Einstein. And so, we might even wonder if the people in our history and in our lives that we say are the great innovators really are more innovative, or are just lucky.
Now, the evolutionary argument is that our populations have always supported a small number of truly innovative people, and they're somehow different from the rest of us. But it might even be the case that that small number of innovators just got lucky. And this is something that I think very few people will accept. They'll receive it with incredulity. But I like to think of it as what I call social learning and, maybe, the possibility that we are infinitely stupid.

It is an interesting idea, and one which gains some credence in considering how innovations occur.  The Einsteins of the world are clearly specialists, who understand one complex field very uniquely.  How do they understand it, but not a number of other complex fields?  In other words, if a person is a brilliant physicist, could he or she have been just as brilliant of a biologist or chemist?  Or is the person uniquely lucky to be able to understand just that one field?  Is there some mutation which allows their brain to clearly understand highly complex systems in a single field?  It is an interesting thought experiment.