I really enjoyed tfurrows' discussion of the explosion of 
knowledge attendant upon the emergence of printing (and 
print-capitalism) and the academic focus on original 
thought[1]. Anthropologists have been documenting and 
debating occurrences of independent invention (i.e., the 
invention of the same technology or practice in multiple 
locations) vs. cultural diffusion (the spread of single 
inventions amongst and between populations) since at least 
the 1890s. It's clear that different people do independently 
invent the same technologies and indepedently arrive at the 
same conclusions on a regular basis (think of Darwin and 
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 
worth.

I think the answers lie in the history of Euro-American 
scholarly traditions, and the fact that those traditions 
predate the massive expansion in the production of printed 
matter.

Our traditions of evidence-based scholarship and our 
practices of citation are the products of Enlightenment- 
influenced scholarship. The scientists and scholars who 
devised those practices were not working with a sea of 
knowledge, but rather a trickle. They could expect to "drink 
it 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- 
influenced 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 
devised reflect that. They valued discovery. 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 
peers to move forward and build upon what was already known. 
Essentially, their position was, "You want credit? Say 
something new." Hence the similar insistence in those 
scholarly traditions that every thesis, dissertation, 
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 
drowning in an endless sea of knowledge? I still see some 
value in insisting on the pursuit of new discoveries, so I'm 
not sure that a change would be good. But I'm also 
incredibly conservative in some ways. It's the radicals of 
the world who force the greatest changes and I'm not one of 
them.

I'm interested in the Herbert Simon book. I'll have to scour 
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