Mosasaurus (revived)

The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Principia Mathematica was published in 1687, two centuries earlier. Conceptually, it seems like natural selection is much simpler than the theory of gravity. So why did it take two centuries longer to discover? A contemporary of Darwin's, Thomas Huxley, read the Origin of Species and said, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” Nobody ever said the same for not beating Newton to the Principia. I wonder if the reason this happened is that Darwin’s cannot be decisively tested. The evidence is circumstantial, retrospective, and cumulative. There's no equivalent of Newton running the numbers on the moon's orbital period and radius, and confirming that it corresponds to his theory. In fact, nearly two thousand years before Darwin, the Roman poet Lucretius argued in De Rerum Natura that organisms suited to their environment survive while ill-adapted ones perish. But nobody built a science on it. Without a tight verification loop, the idea just floated by. Terence Tao argues that Darwin succeeded where Lucretius failed because he had the ability to convince people that the gaps in his theory (specifically, what is the mechanism of heredity) would be filled. This was less about ‘hard’ scientific insight, and more a matter of having good research taste and being persuasive. But it was crucial for progress in biology.

When Copernicus proposed heliocentrism in 1543, it was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model - a system refined over 1,400 years with epicycles precisely tuned to match observed planetary positions. It took another 70 years before Kepler, working from Tycho Brahe's unprecedentedly precise observations, replaced Copernicus’s circles with ellipses - finally making heliocentrism empirically superior. Terence Tao's point is that science needs a high temperature setting. If we only fund and follow what's most state of the art today, we kill the ideas that might need decades of work to surpass some overall plateau.