How does a major breakthrough in science happen? Is it because noone has thought of it that way? Are there major breakthroughs in the future of medicine and technology because noone thought of it that way?
In: Technology
Most scientific advancement occurs in small steps, but the big breakthroughs often do occur because nobody thought of things that way before.
My favorite example is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. If you look at the basic premises of the theory, you will see nothing that people have not known for thousands of years. Animals have traits that get passed on to their children. Animals that die before they reproduce don’t get to pass on their traits. The representation of these traits change over time.
These are all simple observations that were well known to any educated person since antiquity. Darwin’s brilliant insight was not the discovery of these mechanisms, but the discovery that these mechanisms were sufficient, over extremely large periods of time, to explain the diversity of life on Earth. Of course, this insight itself did not come out of nowhere as this was a time when people were beginning to understand just how amazingly old everything really was.
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