My first patent (for a hybrid analog/digital method of detecting pulse centroids for noisy signals) was awarded when I was 14… but, then, my father was a Chief Scientist in a large electronics design department and I had all kinds of electronic parts as toys since I was a toddler, and at some point he started taking me to his office so I started interacting with real engineers building real computers. (When I’ve read Robert W. Wood’s memoirs I discovered that he had a similar experience in his teenage years; in Surely You’re Joking Richard Feynman writes about playing with real-world tech—fixing radios—when he was 12 years old).
I think the current idea of academia as a carefully isolated age-segregated bubble of theoretical learning is seriously misguided, and that guilds running apprenticeships was a much more useful form of education, at least during teenage years. You need to develop problem-solving skills in the real world before going for theory—then you get the benefit of intuition and understanding of how the theories relate to the reality, and how to effortlessly cross the artificial boundaries between disciplines when you need to something in the real world (which has no such boundaries).
By the time I finished the university I already got one of the top civilian awards from the government for contributions to the computer industry. Starting playing with things in the adult world as a teenager has benefits!
As for deference to authority, I never learned it. Lack of it served me well by quickly getting me out of places where I was wasting my time (not that being fired feels good), but it all worked out OK as nobody can fire me now:)
This completely misses the point, for a simple reason: humans (uniquely among Earth lifeforms) are subject not only to genetic/epigenetic evolution but also to memetic evolution. In fact, these two evolutionary levels are tightly coupled, as evidenced by the very good match between phylogenetic trees of human populations and of languages.
It makes no sense to talk about human IGF, any definition excluding memetic component is meaningless. Now, if you look at IGMF optimization a lot of human behavior starts making a lot more sense. (It is also worth pointing out that memetic evolution is much faster, so it is probably the driving factor, way more important than genetic. It is also structurally different, more resembling evolution in bacterial colonies—with organisms swapping genes and furiously hybridising—than Darwinian competition based on IGF.)