Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original

What the mysterious history of "multiple discovery" in science tells us about the nature of creativity

Photo by Pete Godfrey on Unsplash

Today’s essay is an adaptation of David Epstein’s excellent new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, which is about the downsides of too much freedom in life and work and the art of designing the right constraints.

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In 1798, the economist and reverend Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he claimed that population growth would inevitably outstrip the food supply and doom human civilization to cycles of poverty and mass death. This prediction was, to be kind, hogwash. When Malthus’s essay was published, the world held about 1 billion people, and many of them were frequently starving. Today’s global population is more than 8 billion, with the typical person alive today far better fed, clothed, and paid.

But Malthus’ essay was not merely wrong. It was usefully wrong. Decades later, it spurred a revelation in science that Malthus could never have foreseen.

"In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population,” Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography, published in 1876. As he explained, the economist’s grim view of mammalian competition partly inspired his theory of how species evolve:

“Being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work."

The most astonishing thing about Darwin’s breakthrough is that he was not even the only Englishman to read Malthus and apply his ideas to the origin of species. His fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace came up with a similar theory about species competing for survival in a competition that led to the survival of certain genes, and Wallace also credited his aha moment about evolution to none other than the morbid Malthus. In his own words:

Something led me to think of Malthus’ Essay on Population ... It then occurred to me that these checks must also act upon animals, and keep down their numbers ... While vaguely thinking how this would affect any species, there suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest.

The serendipity was so unbelievable that Darwin himself could scarcely believe it. In a letter to a mentor, he wrote: “I never saw a more striking coincidence.” Two Englishmen co-invented one of the most radical and significant theories in scientific history by adapting lessons from the exact same economic essay. How strange is that?

Not strange at all, as it turns out.

Most Good Ideas Are Born As Twins

The most remarkable thing about the simultaneous discovery of evolution is just how utterly unremarkable it is. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find a groundbreaking creation that wasn’t simultaneously invented. Several people are credited with conceiving of the telegraph, the electric motor, the thermometer, photography, the telescope, the jet engine, the discovery of oxygen, the periodic table, and the theory of infection by microorganisms. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently invented calculus, while Newton and Robert Hooke independently arrived at the mathematical law describing gravity. The transistor was invented by teams in the United States and France within months of each other. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed with a patent office on the very same day.

What is true in science is also true for art. In his 1962 book The Shape of Time, the historian George Kubler argued that art history advances not through individual genius but through a kind of invisible hive mind of inspiration and influence. Artists work, often unknowingly and in parallel, on “linked solutions” to the same aesthetic problems. The early 20th century is one dramatic illustration of this in modern cultural history. Between roughly 1905 and 1925, abstraction in visual art, atonality in music, and fragmented interiority and “stream of consciousness” writing in fiction emerged largely independently and nearly simultaneously across the arts. In many cases, artists believed that they were inventing a style only to discover that somebody else was plugging away at the same invention. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that her 1922 experimental book Jacob’s Room represented “a new form for a new novel” with its fragmented approach to perception, only for her avant-garde work to be overshadowed by another modernist masterpiece published several months later: Ulysses by James Joyce.

The sociologist Robert Merton has called this phenomenon “multiple discovery.” Most breakthroughs in science and art are born as twins and triplets.¹ As the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber summarized: “The whole history of inventions is one endless chain of parallel instances.”

The Frame Is More Important Than the Answer

You will sometimes see or hear critics criticize an idea for not being sufficiently original. But what would it mean for an idea to be valuable only if it were entirely new, with no rivalrous twin? We’d have to throw out evolution, ignore gravity, forget calculus, and discard, among other things, trains, electronics, airplanes, and the entire modernist art movement.

The world is built atop things that were discovered independently, often at almost precisely the same time by people working in widely disparate conditions. This is reality, whether we like it or not. What does it tell us about invention, creativity, and originality?

The popular concept of genius and breakthrough is wrong. We want to believe that great new ideas come from non-obvious leaps of creativity; that genius means one individual seeing what no one else can. But the true history of innovation suggests the opposite. Great ideas start to become a little bit obvious when the problem is framed in just the right way.

Darwin and Wallace are often seen as breaking completely with everything that had come before them. In fact, they were applying the ideas of Malthus to the obvious and pressing questions of their time. Why does breeding work so well? Why do we keep finding fossils of creatures that don’t currently exist on Earth? Why do the bones in the flipper of a whale, the wing of a bat, and the arm of a human have so much in common? Before Darwin and Wallace, breeders already recognized that random hereditary changes occasionally appeared. They even had a word for them: “sports.” Darwin and Wallace were mining and connecting the knowledge of their day, rather than dispensing with it. When they discovered Malthus’s theory of human existence as a grim competition between species and environment, what clicked into focus was the concept of evolution as a competition between rivalrous traits, selected for their environmental fit.

The figures we remember as geniuses are usually the ones who were standing closest when a well-framed question came due. The figures we forget are the ones who did the framing; people like Malthus, who don’t solve the problem but state it clearly enough that someone else does. Malthus was wrong about a lot. But he was wrong with such useful precision that two naturalists could each pick up his idea, turn it sideways, and see something he hadn’t.

This is what the history of multiple discovery is actually telling us. The great bottleneck of progress is question-framing. Once a problem is framed with sufficient clarity and precision, the answer almost wants to be found. Once Malthus articulated his grim theory of resource scarcity and competition precisely enough, two scientists on opposite sides of the world arrived at the same revolutionary solution within years of each other. The answer was, in some sense, already waiting.

Malthus being catastrophically wrong about almost everything is almost beside the point. You could even say it is the point. You don’t need the right answer to unlock a breakthrough. You need a frame precise enough that the right answer becomes findable. As Demis Hassabis, cofounder of Google DeepMind and a 2024 Nobel laureate, put it: “It’s harder to come up with a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.” The unsung heroes of intellectual history are the Malthuses, the ones who were wrong about the answer but right about the frame. Perhaps every brilliant idea is just that: an ordinary answer to an extraordinary question.

Adapted From INSIDE THE BOX: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein. Copyright © 2026 by David Epstein. Published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

1. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Merton’s idea of multiple discovery was itself multiply discovered.