Broken Genius – the case of William Shockley (2013)

Ironic that BJTs were developed to work around FETs' undesirable nonlinearities for analogue systems, while now FETs are used to work around BJTs' undesirable inefficiency in switchmode use.

Just goes to show that in engineering, "how good is X?" is a meaningless question without saying what X is used for.

I think it's more of a case that he was such an outlier in horribleness that even a museum with a focus on technology over personalities can't help but talk about it. That and the departure of the 'traitorous eight' is a key Silicon Valley formative event.

There's some disagreement over it, but it does seem likely that Lilienfeld built a working radio with his FETs. We know he drew a schematic of one and it's specific enough that it seems likely it was the result of practical experimentation.

Here's one quote:

In 1981 the semiconductor physicist H. E. Stockman said "Lilienfeld demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver on many occasions, but God help a fellow who at that time threatened the reign of the tube."

I certainly agree with the top half of your post but I believe the bottom is mischaracterizing Rand. As far as I know she did not wish to form a violent authoritarian state a la Lenin to "plan" society into a certain pattern. She seemed to think her desires would, when enough constraints on reasoned self-interest were removed, realize themselves through individual action. And she certainly did not forget that individuals have agency; on the contrary, Objectivism relies on individual self-interest to the intentional exclusion of pretty much all else.

I am not OP, but I guess it's a question of degree..

The reason why this is so controversial is that some people (not necessarily biologists) wanted nature to support the moral systems that are based on equality among people. So they didn't want the nature to have a significant effect.

But the effect of the nature is significant. In this sense, this argument was lost.

It's kind of natural that we want to tie our moral system to some objective, well, nature; for the sake of argument. I don't think it's generally tenable, but I do it myself in certain sense, too. People who argue with god often do it, too, by claiming there is some objective moral system that this god wants.

Another example, from the opposite (liberal) camp, is claiming that being gay is unchangeable for biological reasons. We want nature to support our (I am a liberal too, in fact) moral wish that gays shouldn't be discriminated. And if it was true that being gay is unchangeable, you cannot so easily dismiss the behavior as immoral.

So yeah, in that sense the nature won - it didn't let to lend itself to any ideology, however likable it might have been.

The state of the field previously was anyone could be anything in the right enviroment. For example the following quote from John B. Watson:

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."

For many years this blank slate view predominated, on every topic of human nature. Leading to some tragic results occasionally, such as the case of David Reimer in which attempts to socialize him as a girl after a botched circumcision against his will likely contributed to his suicide.

Eventually the evidence became overwhelming that this view was faulty. But more than that, the wishy washy "everything is nature and nurture all mixing together" fallback position was although not explicitly wrong profoundly disingenuous. Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with a minority contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling. Nature won the debate, as profoundly as it was ever possible to win it, and it annoys me seeing equivocation in the discussion of the matter.