History:Multiple discovery

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Short description: Hypothesis about scientific discoveries and inventions
"Parallel discovery" redirects here. For the thought process, see Parallel thinking.

The concept of multiple discovery (also known as simultaneous invention)[1][2] is the hypothesis that most scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors.[3] The concept of multiple discovery opposes a traditional view—the "heroic theory" of invention and discovery.[4] Multiple discovery is analogous to convergent evolution in biological evolution.[according to whom?][clarification needed]

Multiples

When Nobel laureates are announced annually—especially in physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, and economics—increasingly, in the given field, rather than just a single laureate, there are two, or the maximally permissible three, who often have independently made the same discovery.[according to whom?] Historians and sociologists have remarked the occurrence, in science, of "multiple independent discovery". Robert K. Merton defined such "multiples" as instances in which similar discoveries are made by scientists working independently of each other.[5][6] Merton contrasted a "multiple" with a "singleton"—a discovery that has been made uniquely by a single scientist or group of scientists working together.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag

Commonly cited examples of multiple independent discovery are the 17th-century independent formulation of calculus by Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others;[7] the 18th-century discovery of oxygen by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier and others; and the theory of evolution of species, independently advanced in the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.[8] {{better source needed|date=April 2016} for inventions.[according to whom?][<span title="This claim needs references to reliable sources. (April 2016} ] (invented independently in China, Europe and Africa),[citation needed] the crossbow (invented indep northern Canada, and the Baltic countries),[citation needed] magnetism (discovered independently in Greece, China, and Indi 6)">citation needed] the computer mouse (both rolling and optical), telephone.

Multiple independent discovery, however, is not limited to only a few historic instances involving giants of scientific research. Merton believed that it is multiple discoveries, rather than unique ones, that represent the common pattern in science.[9]

Mechanism

Multiple independent discovery and invention, like discovery and invention generally, have been fostered by the evolution of means of communication: roads, vehicles, sailing vessels, writing, printing, institutions of education, reliable postal services,[10] telegraphy, and mass media, including the internet.[according to whom?] Gutenberg's invention of printing (which itself involved a number of discrete inventions) substantially facilitated the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times.{{citation needed|date=April 2016} nts have catalyzed and accelerated the process of recombinant conceptualization,[clarification needed] and thus also of multiple independent discovery.[citation needed] Multiple independent discoveries show an increased incidence beginning in the 17th century. This may accord with the thesis of British philosopher A.C. Grayling that the 17th century was crucial in the creation of the modern world view, freed from the shackles of religion, the occult, and uncritical faith in the authority of Aristotle. Grayling speculates that Europe's Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), with the concomitant breakdown of authority, made freedom of thought and open debate possible, so that "modern science... rests on the heads of millions of dead." He also notes "the importance of the development of a reliable postal service... in enabling savants... to be in scholarly communication.... [T]he cooperative approach, first recommended by Francis Bacon, was essential to making science open to peer review and public verification, and not just a matter of the lone [individual] issuing... idiosyncratic pronouncements."[10]

Humanities

The paradigm of recombinant conceptualization (see above)—more broadly, of recombinant occurrences—that explains multiple discovery in science and the arts, also elucidates the phenomenon of historic recurrence, wherein similar events are noted in the histories of countries widely separated in time and geography. It is the recurrence of patterns that lends a degree of prognostic power—and, thus, additional scientific validity—to the findings of history.[11]

The arts

Lamb and Easton have argued that science and art are similar with regard to multiple discovery.[3] When two scientists independently make the same discovery, their papers are not word-for-word identical, but the core ideas in the papers are the same; likewise, two novelists may independently write novels with the same core themes, though their novels are not identical word-for-word.[3]{{page needed|date=April 2016}

Civility

After Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had exchanged information on their respective systems of calculus in the 1670s, Newton in the first edition of his Principia (1687), in a scholium, apparently accepted Leibniz's independent discovery of calculus. In 1699, however, a Swiss mathematician suggested to Britain's Royal Society that Leibniz had borrowed his calculus from Newton. In 1705 Leibniz, in an anonymous review of Newton's Opticks, implied that Newton's fluxions (Newton's term for differential calculus) were an adaptation of Leibniz's calculus. In 1712 the Royal Society appointed a committee to examine the documents in question; the same year, the Society published a report, written by Newton himself, asserting his priority. Soon after Leibniz died in 1716, Newton denied that his own 1687 Principia scholium "allowed [Leibniz] the invention of the calculus differentialis independently of my own"; and the third edition of Newton's Principia (1726) omitted the tell-tale scholium. It is now accepted that Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus independently of each other.[12]


See also

References and notes

  1. ↑ Griswold, Martin (2012-11-25). "Are Inventions Inevitable? Simultaneous Invention and the Incremental Nature of Discovery" (self-published blog). The Long Nose: Technology and the Economy. https://mgriz.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/are-inventions-inevitable-simultaneous-invention-and-the-incremental-nature-of-discovery/. 
  2. ↑ Lemley, Mark A., The Myth of the Sole Inventor (July 21, 2011). Stanford Public Law Working Paper No. 1856610, 110 Michigan Law Review 709 (2012), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1856610 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1856610
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Lamb, David; Easton, S. M. (1984). "Originality in art and science [chap. 9]". Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress. Amersham: Avebury Publishing. ISBN 978-0861270255. 
  4. ↑ Epstein, Ralph C. (1926). "Industrial Invention: Heroic, or Systematic?". The Quarterly Journal of Economics 40 (2): 232–272. doi:10.2307/1884619. ISSN 0033-5533. 
  5. ↑ Merton, Robert K. (1963). Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science. 4. 237–282. doi:10.1017/S0003975600000801. ISBN 9780226520704. https://books.google.com/books?id=eprv7hMdO-IC&q=multiples&pg=PA305.  Reprinted in Merton, Robert K., The Sociology of Science, op. cit., pp. 371–382.
  6. ↑ Merton, Robert K. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago, IL, USA: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226520919. https://archive.org/details/sociologyofscien0000mert. 
  7. ↑ Hall, A. Rupert (1980). Philosophers at War: The Quarrel between Newton and Leibniz. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521227322. 
  8. ↑ Reeve, Tori (2009). Down House: the Home of Charles Darwin. London, ENG: English Heritage. pp. 40–41. 
  9. ↑ Merton, Robert K., "Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery: a Chapter in the Sociology of Science", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105: 470–86, 1961. Reprinted in Merton, Robert K., The Sociology of Science, op. cit., pp. 343–70.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Colin McGinn, "Groping Toward the Mind" (review of George Makari, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, Norton, 656 pp.; and A.C. Grayling, The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind, Bloomsbury, 351 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIII, no. 11 (June 23, 2016), p. 68.
  11. ↑ Trompf, G.W. (1979). The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought, from Antiquity to the Reformation. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520034792. https://archive.org/details/ideaofhistorical0000trom. 
  12. ↑ Durant, Will; Durant, Ariel (1963). The Age of Louis XIV: A History of European Civilization in the Period of Pascal, Molière, Cromwell, Milton, Peter the Great, Newton, and Spinoza, 1648-1715. The Story of Civilization: Part VIII. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. pp. 532–34. https://archive.org/details/ageoflouisxivhis00dura. 

Further reading

  • Lamb, David, and S.M. Easton, chapter 9: Originality in art and science, Multiple Discovery: The Pattern of Scientific Progress, Amersham, Avebury Publishing, 1984, ISBN 0861270258.
  • Colin McGinn, "Groping Toward the Mind" (review of George Makari, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, Norton, 656 pp., $39.95; and A.C. Grayling, The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind, Bloomsbury, 351 pp., $30.00), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIII, no. 11 (June 23, 2016), pp. 67–68.
  • Merton, Robert K. (1996). Sztompka, Piotr. ed. On Social Structure and Science. Chicago, IL, USA: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-52070-4. 
  • Merton, Robert K. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. Chicago, IL, USA: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226520919. https://archive.org/details/sociologyofscien0000mert. 
  • Whalen, Eamon, "The Man Who Saw It Coming: Rob Wallace warned us that industrial agriculture could cause a deadly pandemic, but no one listened. Until now." (article on Rob Wallace and his books, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science and Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19), The Nation, vol. 313, no. 5 (September 6/13, 2021), pp. 14–19.
  • Zuckerman, Harriet (1977). Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States. New York, NY: The Free Press. ISBN 9780029357606. https://archive.org/details/scientificeliten00zuck. 



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