Midway through his 900 page history of biology, The Growth of Biological Thought, zoologist Ernst Mayr notes that Alfred Wallace independently developed a theory of speciation by means of natural selection after Darwin had been sitting on his evolutionary theory for two decades:
Reading Wallace’s 1858 paper “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties” spooked Darwin. He did not want to be scooped. Within a year Darwin had rushed his material into an “abstract which… must necessarily be imperfect” as it only gave “the general conclusions” of his theory, and offered only a “few facts in illustration” to support them. We know this abstract well: it was published as The Origin of Species.
[…]
[Mayr] suggests that Darwin and Wallace were not just Victorian naturalists who traveled the tropics — they were Victorian naturalists who traveled the tropics with a copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in hand.
Charles Lyell was an essentialist and a creationist. He answered questions like “what are the causes for the extinction of species?” and “how did the specific species we see in the fossil record arise?” in an explicitly essentialist and creationist fashion. These answers were not sound—but the questions were. These questions “were encountered by Darwin when he read the Principles of Geology during and after the voyage of the Beagle. As a result of Lyell’s writings, these questions became the center of Darwin’s research program.” This was all true for Wallace as well.
Mayr argues that the “Lyell-Darwin relationship illustrates in an almost textbook-like fashion a frequently occurring relationship among scientists.” This is not quite the relationship between pupil and teacher, or that of the “forerunner,” but something else. It is the relationship between the question-poser and the answer-finder.
Tanner Greer sees examples of the same dynamic in history and social science often:
To pick one example, Edward Luttwak’s book Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire is wrong in every one of its essential arguments. So conclusively wrong is this book that I do not think it should be included on any syllabus. Since Luttwak published that book in 1976, a dozen studies of Roman frontier deployments, Roman strategic culture, and Roman decision making have been published. All offer a steady refutation of Luttwak’s work. However, not one of those books or articles would have been written without Luttwak’s work. Luttwak was wrong in every particular except the questions he asked—but those questions were good enough to create an entire subfield of research. May all our errors do such good!
Is this analogous to the Einstein-von Neumann distinction?
“True Intelligence is not revealed by providing the right answer, but in asking the right question.”
…though the right answer certainly doesn’t hurt.
And later, many communities independently discovered that the most effective way to have a network forum engaged on an arbitrary topic is to use provocation in some or other form (from plain trolling to samefagging with a question and wrong answer so that the people are compelled to argue). Hmmm.
Mr. Frogg,
I agree. It has long been my perspective that if you ask the right questions they will lead you to the right answers. If genius is added in, then all the better.