Copycatting

One thing I enjoy about cooking is that the process of transmitting and modifying recipes, which simplistically appears like copycatting, resembles that of the discipline I study, anatomical illustration. One of the works on female anatomy that I study written by Regnier De Graaf, De mulierum organis generationi inservientibus, includes a stunning fifty-page defense of the illustrations. These are among the first illustrations to diverge from the standard Vesalian anatomy. De Graaf was rightly angry the illustrations had been copied by Bartholin, thanks to his sneaky coworker Swammerdam, even before he put them in print. Before De Graaf, centuries of anatomical treatises had copycatted Vesalius' illustrations, much as we modify for our own use others' recipes rather than starting our own from scratch. A friend recently said if I were to invent an unprecedented recipe "from scratch" (as if we could discard our memories and heritage) it would probably be disgusting. Has everything tasty already been discovered, or exist in a recipe ripe for modification? I imagine if I invented something, somewhere out in the world I would have already tried it and I would be much like the Harvard sophomore chic lit writer who inadvertently reproduced a paragraph from another book she'd read. Have any of you out there invented a recipe?
Seeking help from a culinary philosopher,
American Girl