I'm not saying they're not smart, I'm saying it takes more than just a smart man. If Einstein was born in Africa to a family barely scraping by, and never got an education do you think he'd have come up with his theory of relativity? That's a rhetorical question, it's pretty much just a fact that he wouldn't. So you need the genius, you need the education and all the other social infrastructure, lots of circumstance.

Also I'm saying that nobody can come up with the theory of relativity again. That big juicy fruit is picked. I'm not saying it was low hanging, but it also wasn't at the top of the tree. Maybe if someone else figured out relativity and Einstein was born 40 years ago he would just be another relatively unknown physicist today. Maybe he'd have figured out some other amazing revolutionary thing, who knows. He certainly wouldn't have been the one to figure out relativity if it had already been done.