[split] a discussion on origins sparked by "The Order of Things"

[busker]

re Rosalind Franklin, afaik it's more complicated than that.

Watson was an asshole, Franklin's work was an unacknowledged -- in Watson's specific case, probably willfully unacknowledged -- influence on the work of Watson, Crick, and Wilkins,

Rosalind Franklin is mentioned 87 times in Watson's 1968 book The Double Helix. There is no evidence that she was 'unacknowledged'. Watson didn't like her personally, in the beginning, and that is perfectly fine. She was not the easiest person to deal with.

and Franklin did experience (and participate in) a lot of the institutional sexism of her day. 

there were two sides to that sexism - one side ensured that a generation before, it wasn't the women of Britain who were dying in the trenches. At any rate, this isn't pertinent.

Apparently posthumous Nobel prizes were a thing, if rare, before 1974, when they were formally restricted: just a year before, in 1961, Dag Hammarskjold won a Nobel shortly after his death by plane crash. But the only other time a posthumous Nobel was awarded was also in the same year after death, and at four years after her death, not only would she have been unable to plead her case (not that, by most accounts, she would have cared to plead it), but no one would have thought it reasonable to do so.

Both Dag H and Erik Karlfeldt, though technically awarded the Nobel posthumously, died in the same year of their award.
Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel in 1962 - 10 years after their discovery. 
The rule even prior to 1974 was:

Prior to 1974, a person could be awarded a prize posthumously if they had already been nominated before February of the same year. That was the case for Erik Axel Karlfeldt, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1931, and Dag Hammarskjöld, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1961.
(https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011...-scientist)

All that said, one of the people who won the Nobel later on -- Aaron Klug -- worked with Franklin specifically, and was the chief beneficiary of her will: it's known she would have shared his award in 1982, were she still alive by then. 

why on god's good earth?
Rosalind Franklin did not invent x ray crystallography. Nor was she the only person in her time applying it to study molecular structures. The very team that she was working in, under Wilkins, was doing precisely that. In fact, the famous Photo 51 was taken by Raymond Gosling, a grad student in the lab.
Her exploits in one field can't possibly be the basis for her to take credit  for someone else's achievements in a different field. 
Franklin was a talented crystallographer, that's pretty much it. She may have had a stab at immortality if she'd made a leap in the dark and surmised the structure of DNA. The evidence was there in front of her, but she couldn't see it.
And actually, Pauling was the first to publicly propose a helical structure. Maybe he should've shared a third Nobel.

Really, if she were a victim, which she probably would have loathed to be thought of as such, then she was a victim of tragic irony, as it was most likely her work with radioactive substances that sparked her fatal case of ovarian cancer.

There was nothing in her background, coming from an upper middle class English family and graduating with second class honours from Cambridge, that suggests that she'd have been one of science's immortals. Like James Dean, it was her tragic death at a young age that did it.

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The smartest of the bunch was Crick, because he was a physicist.
All science is either physics, or stamp collecting.