For as long as I remember, Einstein has been the poster boy for Genius.  “It doesn’t take an Einstein to figure that out” was a common expression, and Time magazine named Einstein the most influential person of the 20th century, calling him the preeminent scientist in a century dominated by science, and largely crediting him with all the scientific developments that followed his ground-breaking theories.

Not being a hardcore intellectual (my interests are psychometrics and evolution, not super brainy stuff like physics) I never quite understood what the big deal about Einstein was because it was so abstract, but most people above 150 IQ seem to worship him, while the pseudo-intellectual crowd (IQ 120-150) all worshipped Marx and Chomsky (every student at the university I attended would start their sentences with “from a Marxist perspective”).

One thing I did find odd about Einstein though is despite his reputation as the greatest Genius to ever live,  he was anything but a precocious todler (he learned to talk late) and his brain size at autopsy was somewhat small.

The two most Darwinian correlates of intelligence are brain size and income so I tend to admire people who symbolize these correlation (i.e. Bill Gates using his 170 IQ to become the World’s richest man, or Chris Langan’s stratospheric brain size making him “America’s smartest man”).  Einstein was always a thorn in my side because every time I mentioned my beloved brain-size IQ correlation, someone would cite Einstein’s smallish brain as evidence against it.  Of course a single individual proves little, but symbolically, Einstein’s lack of brain mass was devastating.

Thus I was intrigued to hear about a video claiming Einstein plagerized his theory and was not the super genius the media built him up to be.  Of course the person trashing Einstein might have an extremist political agenda for discrediting Einstein,  so keep that in mind when listening to the interview: