There will always be plenty of idiots out there. Although some of you seem comfortable putting yourselves on par with such great men as Socrates, you shouldn't.
There is within everyone the potential to do great things. There will always be lots of people to squander their gifts.
As for todays geniuses. Steven Hawking is one great example. Watson and Crick discovered the helical structure of DNA decades ago. It is easier to look back on someone such as Barbara McClintock and say now that woman is a genius. Or maybe Linus Pauling, one of the greats of Organic Chemistry. Dead for about 10 years. It is much easier to take a look back at a body of research over the course of a persons life than to recognize someone that is doing great things now.
A few more recent great minds, and some older ones: Arnie Levine, James Watson(1928), Francis Crick(1916), Rosalind Franklin(1920-1958), Sydney Brenner(1927-), Barbara McClintock(1902-1992), Erwin Schrodinger(1887-1961), Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac(1902-1984), Albert Einstein(1879-1955), Heisenburg(1901-1976)
one of the best places to find the brightest names today is the list of nobel laureates
http://www.nobel.se/nobel/index.html
It's really not people getting brighter generally but people getting more average. Really the new acheivments are just not as heralded because people just don't understand science at a high level generally. Or to put it more bluntly people ignore what they don't understand so they can makethemselves feel smarter.
NAyway I ran out of energy, i'm going to sleep now.