Discoveries Come in Multiples

When I read this book by Edward Hooper trying to explain the source and spread of the virus that causes aids, I found it curious that two teams working separately had independently discovered vaccines for polio. The vaccines were produced by Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk within a short period of each other but I did not think it through enough in spite of my earlier knowledge that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibinz also independently discovered calculus.

Malcolm Gladwell's dated piece in the New Yorker magazine discusses the fact that there's a very pronounced and definite tendency for scientific and technological discoveries to occur in multiples. Explaining the work by a firm known as Intellectual ventures which was founded by Nathan Myhrvold, he argues persuasively that scientific discoveries are not as rare as conventional thinking has it.

By necessity, thinkers and researchers are acutely aware of the main gaps in knowledge for their disciplines and this may explain the phenomenon of multiple discoveries. To my mind, the factors at work suggests that keen researchers work by assembling critical knowledge about the problem and by looking at the entire set of information, are able to generate insights on where the solutions may lie. To my mind the article also suggests that in the same way that material scientific discoveries lead researchers to arrive at the correct solutions independently, it may also be that errors manifest the same tendency. But the critical factor is that good scientific ideas are not scarce.