Cases where scientific knowledge was in fact lost and then rediscovered provide especially strong evidence about the discovery counterfactauls, e.g. Hero’s eolipile and al-Kindi’s development of relative frequency analysis for decoding messages. Probably we underestimate how common such cases are, because the knowledge of the lost discovery is itself lost — e.g. we might easily have simply not rediscovered the Antikythera mechanism.
Hero’s eolipile was an invention that had no practical use. The stream engine that did have practical use relied on high quality brass that wasn’t available at Hero’s time and only available in the late 1600s.
Darwinian natural selection is sometimes pointed to as a late development, given that it could have been inferred by anyone who understood that certain traits are heritable. However, the fact that two people figured it out more or less independently at approximately the same time makes me think that it came at about the right time.
What about Mendelian Inheritance? It was initially discovered by Gregor Mendel in 1865, but it was seen as being a very narrow special case of genetics until about 1900, when de Vries, Correns and von Tschermak “rediscovered” his work. So that’s about 35 years during which the statistical laws of inheritance were published, but weren’t being used or built upon.
Cases where scientific knowledge was in fact lost and then rediscovered provide especially strong evidence about the discovery counterfactauls, e.g. Hero’s eolipile and al-Kindi’s development of relative frequency analysis for decoding messages. Probably we underestimate how common such cases are, because the knowledge of the lost discovery is itself lost — e.g. we might easily have simply not rediscovered the Antikythera mechanism.
Hero’s eolipile was an invention that had no practical use. The stream engine that did have practical use relied on high quality brass that wasn’t available at Hero’s time and only available in the late 1600s.
Darwinian natural selection is sometimes pointed to as a late development, given that it could have been inferred by anyone who understood that certain traits are heritable. However, the fact that two people figured it out more or less independently at approximately the same time makes me think that it came at about the right time.
What about Mendelian Inheritance? It was initially discovered by Gregor Mendel in 1865, but it was seen as being a very narrow special case of genetics until about 1900, when de Vries, Correns and von Tschermak “rediscovered” his work. So that’s about 35 years during which the statistical laws of inheritance were published, but weren’t being used or built upon.