Robert Merton argued that multiple independent discovery is science's dominant pattern, making singleton discoveries the anomaly that needs explaining

Robert K. Merton's sociology of science inverts the intuitive picture of discovery. On his account, "the pattern of independent multiple discoveries in science is in principle the dominant pattern rather than a subsidiary one" — so the phenomenon requiring explanation is not why the same thing gets discovered twice, but why it is ever discovered only once. Singletons, on this reading, are the anomaly; multiples are the rule, because a discovery becomes possible when the prior state of knowledge makes it "in the air" for anyone positioned to reach it.

This thesis supplies the general law behind the vault's recurring priority threads. The Werbos backpropagation myth is precisely a singleton credit imposed on a multiple: the reverse mode of differentiation was independently reached at least five times across five fields (Ostrowski, Hachtel, Linnainmaa, Werbos, Rumelhart–Hinton–Williams), which is Merton's dominant pattern in miniature — and priority without paternity is the shape multiples take when there is no channel of transmission between them. Adjudicating such a myth is the source-critical act described at observation-priority-adjudication-is-documentary-source-criticism.

The thesis has a standing rival in the vault: Tertius Chandler holds that most apparent multiples are really shared descent from a common prior — repackagings, not independent convergence. The backprop story sits inside exactly this dispute. Merton's framework also anchors the vault's wider sociology-of-credit cluster (claim-credit-assignment-spans-sociology-and-backprop, claim-credit-detectors-are-themselves-misattributed).

The claim currently rests on a single Tier-3 blog quoting Merton; his 1961 primary has not been read, so the note stays seedling — routed to question-verify-merton-multiples-dominant-pattern-and-predecessors.