[mattkrause]

I really doubt that.

Being smart certainly helps, but you also need the right opportunities, environment, and colleagues to “produce” science. These all feed back onto each other in complicated ways: funding gives you time and space to work on tough problems, which attracts talented colleagues, who can make you yourself smarter and thus able to attract more funding and more colleagues…and so on. This works the other way too: a funding squeeze limits what you can work on (if anything), etc.

I can certainly believe that it looks like a power law, but I doubt “intrinsic ability”, insofar as that’s even a thing, has a similar distribution.