Evolution vs Revolution (Score 2)

It all depends on scope of time and your depth of knowledge. The closer you are to any innovation the less it looks like revolution and the more like evolution. I mean, at your level of detail, the Wright Brothers didn't do anything extraordinary, just applied well-known and proven laws of nature to create more lift than the weight of a man. Yet, as any schoolchild knows, they invented the airplane.

Couple this with the fact that research in the past half-century has been conducted more and more by large teams of scientists and engineers, where inter-communication is required, and it is even easier to see the path from Point A to Point B without having to acknowledge any individual as a genius. Thus, if you are close to the process, you don't get the "Wow!" slap in the face that you would get if you looked away for a month and then were presented with the final product.

Final thought: We have become so accustomed to *constant* innovation that we tend to only notice when it has ceased! Moore's Law is not a law of stagnation, but rather one of assumed dramatic innovation! The mere fact that it remains largely assumed proves that there continues to be massive innovation!

BTW, non-bio tech examples: Flash memory, IBM MicroDrive, cheap digital photography, GHz+ processor speeds (which according to many rags a few years ago were physically impossible even with die-shrinkage), home networking without wires, hybrid low-emmision vehicles, etc.