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eternal_neophyte comments on Innate Mathematical Ability - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure about this: lots of humans can make small incremental progress. For every Isaac Newton or Terry Tao there's a 10 or 15 people who are a few years behind them.
If this is in fact true then there is I think a decent question here if the Great Filter is partially the presence of geniuses or people much smarter than the norm for the species.. It may be that most species have a very low levels of variation in intelligence levels. I know that for studies with ravens there's little variation in what puzzles they can solve, but the total intelligence may be substantially lower enough than humans that it is hard to see. Also it is possible that are samples are too small to notice the really smart ravens.
"lots of humans can make small incremental progress"
You could easily imagine that the contribution each sub-genius makes is only appreciated or assimilated in part, since it's easier to derive trivial results from powerful theorems than to construct proofs of powerful theorems from trivial results. The problem is gathering seemingly disparate and disconnected pieces of knowledge together in a single mind and linking them into a coherent whole, and a genius who produced many of these bits of knowledge by himself is in a much better position to do this than somebody who has to learn everything from external sources, struggling against the inadequacy of memory for learned material althewhile. So the "minor" contributions are lost to time simply because they're not sufficiently important to be studied widely.