knowledge attendant upon the emergence of printing (and
thought[1]. Anthropologists have been documenting and
nvention of the same technology or practice in multiple
locations) vs. cultural diffusion (the spread of single
nventions amongst and between populations) since at least
the 1890s. It's clear that different people do independently
nvent the same technologies and indepedently arrive at the
Wallace both putting forth the idea of evolution).
So why, then, is there such a focus in academia on "who was
first"?
Here's my attempt to answer that question, for what it's
matter.
Our traditions of evidence-based scholarship and our
nfluenced scholarship. The scientists and scholars who
knowledge, but rather a trickle. They could expect to "drink
t all." A competent scholar in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries might have been expected to gain a
mastery of all of the important discoveries in his or her
field. And the major objective of those Enlightenment-
nfluenced scholars was to make significant additions to
those small bodies of extant knowledge. They were focussed
on (and believed in) progress. The systems of citation they
acknowledged additions to their collective understanding.
They did not want to incentivize the re-publication of
existing knowledge, but hoped instead to encourage their
Essentially, their position was, "You want credit? Say
article and book should either address a new, unexplored
aspect of the subject matter, or should say something new
about an already-studied topic.
Are those traditions still relevant today, when we are
value in insisting on the pursuit of new discoveries, so I'm
not sure that a change would be good. But I'm also
ncredibly conservative in some ways. It's the radicals of
the world who force the greatest changes and I'm not one of
them.
ABE Books for it. One of my favourite works on the history
of science is Thomas Kuhn's _The_Structure_of_Scientific_
Revolutions_, but I haven't read anything in that field for
a very long time.
[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2019-01-14_endlessRiver.txt
