Reinventing the wheel

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To reinvent the wheel is to attempt to duplicate—most likely with inferior results—a basic method that has already previously been created or optimized by others.

The inspiration for this idiomatic metaphor is that the wheel is an ancient archetype of human ingenuity (one so profound that it continues to underlie much of modern technology). As it has already been invented and is not considered to have any inherent flaws, an attempt to reinvent it would add no value to it and be a waste of time, diverting the investigator's resources from possibly more worthy goals.