>Many people are likely to have realized something long before a team of scientists got funded, figured out how to test the idea, analyzed results, wrote papers, published, and officially confirmed it.

Can you expand on that? Who are these many people? Any examples? Lay people who have nothing to do with the field, simply intuiting results without doing the work to carefully rule out external factors? Or people without scientific training performing science without realizing that what they're doing is science ?