No, obviously not. I have argued that academic achievement is necessary for an individual to be worth something. Not that it is sufficient.
So I may make the assumption that you forget to say all that you mean, or do you just change your mind according to circumstances?
If I had said " do you admire The Queen's Surgeon? " without giving you any further information, I'm pretty certain what your answer would have been.
This is what you said:-
Note that I do have some personal insight into this, and am not just talking out my posterior: My father worked in a research facility (see
this (PDF) for an example of the sort of things they did). He was a technician, not a researcher, but he and the others with his job designed and built the electronics, dug the ditches, hauled the test equipment around, etc. And everyone in that whole place was necessary to keep it running, from the people doing purely manual labor to the cafeteria workers to the people doing skilled electronics work to the physicists at the top of the hierarchy who got the credit when the Nobel prizes got handed out. But it was
everyone who made it work, and they couldn't have done it without each other, and everyone there was more aware of that than Louise seems to be. Scientific discoveries are not made by heroic individualistic supermen sitting around in vacuums, they're generally made by teams of people, most of whom work for little to no credit but who are nonetheless indispensable. Without the rest of the team, the physicists would be sitting around unable to discover much of anything, and without the physicists, the rest of the team wouldn't be preparing for the right jobs, etc, it's a genuine interdependent relationship, theoretical and practical people working together. And you'll notice the "acknowledgements" section of that article I linked to is huge -- for a reason. Seriously, read through those two pages of acknowledgements and you'll get an idea of a
fraction of how many people's work go into things like that.
