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I often hear senior male scientists griping about how Lynn Margulis’ 1967 endosymbiotic theory was actually first proposed by the Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski 60 years prior, and therefore she shouldn’t get so much credit for it. /thread
If you want to make that argument, you have to acknowledge many other theories first proposed by someone else (in multiple cases, by a Russian, in the late 1800s/early 1900s) later expanded upon by a Western White man in English, which are rarely criticized for originality.
I’m collecting a list of such discoveries/theories to show how common it is that multiple people have the same idea, but the western white man and/or the one who publishes it in English gets much more of the credit for the idea. Please add more examples to the list below:
