Nature vs. nurture. So hard to unravel. No point in having processing power if you don't do anything with it. And you don't know the limit of what you can do with your brain until you try it. As your quote in your signature line says, "For all things good and fair, the gods give nothing to man without toil and effort"
Circumstance also affects achievement. Mozart was considered a genius. But he was also heavily sculpted into being a child star by his father. Sometimes I wonder if he would have a better life if he was allowed to be a child and less of a star.
I'm sure many of Bach's children wrote music when they were young. But they didn't get dragged around Europe like trained monkeys and I suspect they were emotionally better off for it.
But I have seen some studies that suggest that beyond about 130 a higher IQ isn't necessarily helpful for achievement. For one thing it gets hard to measure. Beyond a certain point higher scores could be just statistical noise.
For another, creativity and discipline become more important. And depression and anxiety is common for people with high IQs. The smarter you are the more isolated you feel.
Natally I'm a bit lopsided. I think I could achieve a lot if I put my mind to it. But who gets called a genius in the end comes down to who writes the history books. Some artists weren't recognized until after they were dead. And there are a lot of people who I know who are exceptionally talented who will probably not make the history books.
What makes one guy in a graduating fine art class the nationally recognized photographer and another not? Some portion of it is just luck, or striking the right chord at the right time. Any indication of genius in a chart would be hard to unravel from fame.
I had a chart in mind which exemplified the difference I noted in that post.
https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Stroud,_Robert
This is the chart of Robert Stroud a.k.a the Birdman of Alcatraz
Robert Franklin Stroud (January 28, 1890 – November 21, 1963), known as the "Birdman of Alcatraz", was a convicted murderer, American federal prisoner and author who has been cited as one of the most notorious criminals in the United States.[1][2][3] During his time at Leavenworth Penitentiary, he reared and sold birds and became a respected ornithologist, although regulations did not allow him to keep birds at Alcatraz, where he was incarcerated from 1942 to 1959. Stroud was never released from the federal prison system; he was imprisoned from 1909 to his death in 1963.
In 1920, while in solitary confinement at Leavenworth, Stroud discovered a nest with three injured sparrows in the prison yard. He cared for them and within a few years had acquired a collection of about 300 canaries. He began extensive research into birds after being granted equipment by a prison-reforming warden. Stroud wrote Diseases of Canaries, which was smuggled out of Leavenworth and published in 1933,[4] as well as a later edition (1943). He made important contributions to avian pathology, most notably a cure for the hemorrhagic septicemia family of diseases, gaining much respect and some level of sympathy among ornithologists and farmers. Stroud ran a successful business from inside prison, but his activities infuriated the prison staff, and he was eventually transferred to Alcatraz in 1942 after it was discovered that Stroud had been secretly making alcohol using some of the equipment in his cell.
Stroud began serving a 17-year term at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary on December 19, 1942, and became inmate #594. In 1943, he was assessed by psychiatrist Romney M. Ritchey, who diagnosed him as a psychopath, but with an I.Q. of 112.[5] Stripped of his birds and equipment, he wrote a history of the penal system.
This man doesn't have an impressive IQ, however this biographical information speaks unequivocally to his intellectual achievement.
His natal chart shows the standard markers of an "intelligent" person - At 6 planets + the ascendant in the element of air - this is an individual who will be strongly geared toward intellectualism, cognition and a mental approach to life. Traditionally speaking, the "human" signs were Virgo, Gemini, Aquarius, Libra and the first half of Sagittarius (the human portion of it). These were the signs that are classically attributed with intelligence/intellectualism and social grace.
He also has some chart factors that contribute to his scientific achievement, separate and apart from his intellectualism. Uranus is located on Spica and the combination of the planet that modernly represents the new and shocking, brilliance, unorthodox thinking and behaviour and flashes of intuitive inspiration and the willfulness to pursue a path to the death, as long as it came from one's personal volition with this fixed which according to Manilius signifies:
"The temperaments of those whose span of life she pronounces at their birth Erigone (Virgo) will direct to study, and she will train their minds in the learned arts. She will give not so much abundance of wealth as the impulse to investigate the causes and effects of things. On them she will confer a tongue which charms, the mastery of words, and that mental vision which can discern all things, however concealed they be by the mysterious workings of nature. From the Virgin will also come the stenographer: his letter represents a word, and by means of his symbols he can keep ahead of utterance and record in novel notation the long speech of a rapid speaker. But with the good there comes a flaw: bashfulness handicaps the early years of such persons, for the Maid, by holding back their great natural gifts, puts a bridle on their lips and restrains them by the curb of authority. And (small wonder in a virgin) her offspring is not fruitful." [Astronomica, Manilius, 1st century AD, p.237 and 239]
... then we can see how his response to the injured bird in his cell was so different from the norm. That Uranus straddles the 1st and 2nd which describes the personality and the profession. He earned as a result of his science, and with a nickname like Birdman of Alcatraz you don't need to ask if such a guy was an unconventional fellow.
Then according to Gauquelin's research Saturn was associated with scientists and Stroud has the planet in a Gauquelin zone.
Jupiter is making a phasis in this chart, on the same day that he was born. Jupiter is higher learning and phasis is often relevant to profession or what one focuses their life on doing. His intellectual achievements certainly fall into that category.
The 9th house is populated with the outers and the NN straddles the cusp of the 9th and 10th. Some more testimonies to his intellectual achievement.
Aquarius is then modernly associated with Scientists and his ascendant ruler as well as his Sun and Moon are located in that sign.
Despite his impressive resume, all of this was achieved by someone with an IQ of supposedly 112 (116 by another account). Hardly exceptional in terms of raw processing power.
To address some of the other things in your post, I'm interested in the cases who are exceptionally talented and what there charts have to say. The people who you personally know who are wickedly exceptional but probably won't get acclaim. The people like Stars' friend who are very brilliant at developing AI. Those are the persons I'd be interested to look at - That's probably where a study of genius might yield fruit vs. intelligence which while related doesn't cover exactly the same ground. I don't care one lick about who the history books have deemed geniuses -- I wouldn't necessarily start a study of exceptionalism with Einstein for instance, despite being evoked into discussions related to genius.
I also make a demarcation between achievement vs. exceptionalism/raw power. I tend toward creativity being a key component in exceptionalism, but discipline is needed to make anything that is relevant to the wider public. If one were to use the current crop of "known geniuses" you may very well be picking up eminence indicators combined with intellectual/creative placements which potentially make the whole astrodatabank project contaminated in the sense of providing you with individuals who are with anything else that they might have to offer, "famous".
I don't think genius would be hard to unravel from fame if you started from the charts that were not famous, but displayed that ridiculously gifted manifestation that one would deem as "genius". I'd also want to take a more inductive approach to finding genius in the chart than to tack on assumptions about what genius is, which will influence the aspects I "think" a genius should have, then miss the actual placements that a genius actually has in the chart.
Which brings up another important point that your posts brings up, which is what exactly are we looking for when we look for "genius" in the chart? Are we looking for achievement markers? Are we looking for raw talent/processing power? Are we looking for eminence? Is genius even a thing which can be seen in the chart, since it might just be an imprecise term that constellates a bunch of ideas together that make up "the genius archetype"?
And then, no matter how much intelligence markers it has, a table will never be on par with a person's natural capacity. Astrology provides the time, place and "energy" but it has to be applied to an object in order to have a physical manifestation. The je ne sais quoi might be beyond astrology's grasp.