It is not rarity that I stress, it is unpredictability. Randomness in its most basic manner. You can, if you are a tyrant and the fancy strikes you that way, breed men for height, or for strength, or for blonde hair, or even for IQ; these are things that are partly or wholly innate and that can be bred into someone, whether or not their presence is rare. (There are Indians and black Africans with blue eyes.) But the end of my argument, and the core of it, is that it is a logical impossibility to breed for genius; that any program that sought to create geniuses by any kind of planned action would achieve the reverse of its goals, producing a generation of loquacious but imperceptive critics. That is because genius happens at the interception of a particular kind of individual potential, which is not always the same - the white-hot mathematical logic of the fanatic Newton was certainly not comparable to the emotional fervour of the irascible drinker, Beethoven - and specific cultural and social developments whose appearance cannot be predicted in advance. Eric Clapton would never have been what he is without the electric guitar, the American tradition of blues playing, and the peculiar position of England with respect to anything American - always both near and distant, offering a chance of reflection that the natives perhaps might not achieve. For instance.