alt Hacker NewsI see it as a facet of a larger thing where humans are instinctively driven to create stories--even oversimplified ones--about the world to capture and explain it.
It also happens in stories about how X was invented/discovered in history (ignoring a thousand required incremental steps and simultaneous discoveries) or how we can't help but intuit patterns in data we abstractly know is random ("hot streaks", "the coin is overdue for landing the other way".)
Stories about Newton seem oversimplified to me. Yes he was good, yes he came up with stuff, but he was also a good integrator (heh) of existing knowledge.