[benkahuna]

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I vote for the guys who invented the internet. If it wasn't for them, all us idiots couldn't get together and discuss important questions like "Who can mankind have not lived without?"

We'd all have to get lives. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

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You mean Al Gore? Yeah, things would be very different had he not lost in 2000. :P

(Al Gore was quoted out of context, btw--he just said he was more legislatively involved with creating the internet than anyone else, which is true)


As for Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace came up with evolutionary theory concurrently and Darwin gave him joint credit for the idea.


As for the whole thing? I think you need the original humans from Africa, but after that it's far too complex an issue to seriously address. We don't have sociologically deterministic math like in the Foundation trilogy. It's so hard to disentangle individual human achievements from their supporting network of other humans and other temporal environmental conditions as to make this question unanswerable by me (if I'm being honest) and at the same time pointless.

It's also a staggering list. So many individuals have contributed such important ideas upon which further ideas were built in addition to had so much political influence that this list might include milllions of individuals (in part because so many people were important when the earth's population was lower and the influence of earlier peoples would influence later peoples in chaotic and exponential ways). My list would include every Nobel Prize winner and every viable candidate for starters.