The idea of a world progressing, or evolving, in science hasn’t been around forever. In fact, the Enlightenment period in the seventeen hundreds with scientists such as Isaac Newton the man who discovered gravity, Louis Pasteur the chemist who invented the vaccine to prevent rabies, Charles Darwin the father of evolution, Benjamin Franklin the first scientist to toy with the dangers and possibilities of electricity, and so many more wonderful scientists was the start of the “progress” that revolutionized our world. Of the scientists who progressed our world, few shaped modern biology the way Charles Darwin managed to. Thomas Kuhn saw the progress people like Darwin made not as truth seeking, but simply as filling in another piece of the puzzle of science, challenging the very definition of the Scientific Revolution. After reviewing Kuhn’s idea of science, Darwin appears to play a substantial role in the paradigm shift from the science of old to new. Kuhn looked at Darwin and saw science evolve much as Darwin’s organisms appeared to evolve
Many scientists seemed to play a small role in Kuhn’s paradigm. Newton believed that science could answer questions accurately, if not “nearly” truthfully. Newton still sought the truth, but acknowledged that one scientist could not solve all of the problems of the world, and thus would solve what he could and leave the harder stuff for people of the future. Newton also believed scientists should focus on observable physical matters that they could answer, rather than philosophical ideas that could not be solved. Newton gave Thomas Kuhn an example of a paradigm shift. Before Newton, there was what was considered new science, which had abjured to Aristotle’s old belief system and the current teaching methods of science for that time. Newton didn’t discover new truths in the mind of Thomas Kuhn; he simply found a way to rediscover why something in nature, like gravity, occurred. His “discovery” had already been interpreted one way, all Newton did was reinterpret the observed gravity in a new way, according to Kuhn. Isaac Newton gave science the observation of gravity that pulls molecules together, without him, DNA could not be bound to the Universe and molecules would never bond to one another. Darwin’s Big Bang theory relies on the explanation of Gravity through Isaac Newton. With Newton’s science, other scientists made discoveries that built upon his science to evolve the theoretical thoughts of the universe to Charles Darwin’s evolution. Thomas Kuhn believed that science did not build upon itself, but the systematic, rather than random, ways of science lead to...
