Confusing possibility with inevitability

From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. Contra Malcolm Gladwell's argument in Outliers. Murray argues for the weight of accomplishment to tilt toward the individual, Malcolm that it should tilt more toward the circumstances. Of course it is neither one or the other - sometimes independent discoveries are almost mystically contemporaneous, it is clear there was some element of inevitability. Sometimes those discoveries are uniquely individual. Murray:

The second blind spot is the tendency to confuse that which has been achieved with that which must inevitably have been achieved. It is easy to assume that someone like Aristotle was not so much brilliant as fortunate in being born when he was. A number of basic truths were going to be figured out early in mankind's intellectual history, and Aristotle gave voice to some of them first. If he hadn't, someone else soon would have. But is that really true? Take as an example the discovery of formal logic in which Aristotle played such a crucial role. Nobody had discovered logic (that we know of) in the civilizations of the preceding five millennia. Thinkers in the non-Western world had another two millennia after Aristotle to discover formal logic independently, but they didn't. Were we in the West "bound" to discover logic because of some underlying aspect of Western culture? Maybe, but what we know for certain is that the invention of logic occurred in only one time and one place, that it was done by a handful of individuals, and that it changed the history of the world. Saying that a few ancient Greeks merely got there first isn't adequate acknowledgement of their leap of imagination and intellect.