Networking plays a huge role in our reputation and in the rewards we reap for our other actions.

It's understandable to some extent, since we can envision the case of a person who solves some tremendously important problem, but never tries hard enough to share it with the rest of the world. On the other hand, we can also see cases where someone spends all their time networking, but doesn't do much in the way of analysis, basically just acting as a human information replicator (and likely a flawed one at that).

Historically, the latter type of person was more useful than they are today, when technology has developed better ways for us to spread information, but I think the desire to reward social interaction isn't going to go away (and clearly still has benefits). In the past, I would guess that extroverts were rewarded more than introverts (another way to talk about less extreme forms of those two types of people), but I think that is changing with time and technology.