> rare indeed. Even evolution and the relatedness of species was "in the air"
> in Darwin's time. Otherwise I have a feeling he would have waited to
> publish until after his death. I've always thought that may have been what
> he was trying to do, and only published because of Wallace's work.
That is precisely the case. Darwin had already completed a preliminary
manuscript and instructed his wife to publish it after his death. Wallace's
letter sent him into a panic (of sorts), but even then he hesitated until his
friends J. D. Hooker and Charles Lyell insisted.
The theory of evolution is, however, one of those excellent examples of
theories that are inevitable because of the proponderance of scientific data
and theory that has accumulated to that point. Had Darwin died on the Beagle
or chickened-out once he was home and never developed his theory, Wallace
would have developed and published it only a few years later. Even Darwin
admitted that Wallace's ideas were viryually identical to his own.
Nowadays, ideas in science are even more inevitable, because so many people
are all doing the same basic research in competition with each other. It is
in fact very common for labs who believe they are the only ones close to a
breakthrough to be pre-empted by another lab who moved faster than they did.
Despite Mike BGene's appeal to romanticism, the mapping of the HD in the
Eighties was inevitable. The idea that it could be mapped by a faster, if
more haphazard, method was already circulating when Wexler decided to pursue
the issue. Had she never become involved, someone in some other lab would
have decided to look into the matter (probably more than one persons in more
than one labs) because it was so inticing an idea, and the HD gene would
still have been mapped by the end of the Eighties. The accomplishment "was
in the air"; all that was needed was someone to grasp the opportunity and
Wexler just happened to be lucky enough to grasp it first.
Kevin L. O'Brien