@TheAlexKnapp on Religion & Science

Alex Knapp in reply to Stillwater says:

Most big advances in scientific knowledges resulted from the lone genius offering an evidence-based theory with greater explanatory power than it’s predecessors until it’s accepted by a majority and becomes the new consensus.

This really isn’t the case. Most “lone geniuses” worked in collaboration with partners who are frequently forgotten. Their ideas were often influenced by ideas and concepts of peers and predecessors. And often some of the ideas we attribute to the “lone genius” were more often interpretations and commentary that came from their followers and admirers through the years. (Aristotle is a big example of this – a lot of “Aristotle’s” ideas are really developments of his followers, commentators and interpreters.)

History has a way of fixating on big names with big personalities and attributing things to them they were only partially or sometimes not at all responsible for. History also has a way of forgetting people who developed inventions or concepts independently in favor of the person who insisted on the credit the most. (Like poor Galileo Ferraris, who independently developed a lot of stuff that Tesla gets credit for – and did it before Tesla.)

Even worse, history has a way of making people famous for stuff they really weren’t that good at. Galileo is noted for heliocentrism (for obvious reasons), but he really didn’t do much to prove or advance heliocentrism at all. He did much more interesting and better work in other areas of physics & astronomy.

The fact is that when it comes to scientific discovery, unique insights are fairly few and far between. Far more often, once the knowledge available at the time leads to a distinct conclusion, lots of people will end up there. If Copernicus hadn’t published on heliocentrism, there were other astronomers working at the time whose ideas were already leading to it. Somebody else would have gotten there. Once we had alternating current, the induction motor was just a matter of time.

Or as Mark Twain put it better, “The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”Report