“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
—Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)
“There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.”
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
I’d be interested in how the author quantifies a “new idea.” Freud gets the credit for psychoanalysis, but it was prefigured—according to Freud himself—by Nietzsche. Darwin gets the credit for evolution, but he was working on the idea at the same time as Alfred Wallace, both of whom were extending an idea of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s, and all of whom were scooped by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. As for string theory, it’s just another extension of the ancient Greek theory of atomism defended by Epicurus, who got it from Democritus, who got it from Leucippus (and the whole idea of a “theory of everything” is an extension of Empedocles’ attempt to reconcile the major pre-Socratic theories regarding matter into a single theory of the “all”).
There is an argument to be made, then, that every supposed new idea is really “merely” an extension of an old idea. Indeed, I have a professor who makes a similar argument all the time while explaining where he thinks he has found some famous idea of modern philosophy or science in the works of the ancient Greeks. Maybe he’s pushing a little too hard, maybe not. Then again, what is so “mere” about a new take on an old idea if it brings us to a new level of understanding? Why must intellectual progress be a series of fits and starts rather than a slowly expanding latticework of interconnected ideas building on one another?
The above Original Idea™ is © 2011, All Rights Re—wait, who? Heraclitus? More than 2000 years ago?! Oh… never mind, then.