Rewards based on priority drive unnecessary competition

One of the consequences of having brains adapted for social cognition is that we care about status and reputation. We want credit for what we achieve, and we like to come first. It need surprise no one that, even though the idealised vision of science supposes it’s all about the ideas and discoveries and not the personalities who make them, scientific research is no less egoistic and competitive than any other human endeavour.

That’s a mixed blessing. Just as market competition can drive both innovation and efficiency, and corruption and foul play, so too does the stimulus of scientific fame and priority. It was ever thus: witness the bitter disputes between Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens over the balance-spring clock, or Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz over the invention of calculus. ‘If the glory of the invention was enough for both’, says Newton’s biographer Richard Westfall, ‘so was the blame for the contest.’

Because many scientific ideas and inventions arrive when the time is ripe, it’s likely they will then occur to more than one smart mind. So we see Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Mendeleev both figuring out the periodic table in the 1860s, and Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace understanding evolution by natural selection a decade earlier. It takes rare generosity, like Darwin’s, to give proper credit to a rival (and even he has not wholly escaped accusation).