Stolen Ideas? or Great Minds Thinking Alike?
Figuring out whether someone committed plagiarism is usually straightforward. You compare the two texts to see how much of one appears verbatim in the other. Even if some words have been changed, there is often a pattern of similarities that can’t be coincidental. It’s not that hard.
Determining whether someone swiped an idea, or a set of ideas, is another beast entirely. In a review in the June 7 issue of The New York Review of Books, the possibility is raised that Terence W. Deacon, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley, borrowed heavily and failed to credit core ideas in his book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter, from at least two scholars. Here’s what the NYRB reviewer, Colin McGinn, a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, writes:
One would never think from reading Incomplete Nature that the author’s main contentions have already been systematically developed by others, and that there is in fact hardly an original idea in the book. Two works, in particular, stand out in the prior literature: Dynamics in Action by Alicia Juarrero and Mind in Life by Evan Thompson. Neither book is cited by Deacon, although they cover much the same ground as his—far more lucidly and insightfully.