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Above all, British authors Desmond ( The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs ) and Moore, the editorial consultant to Cambridge University's Darwin Letters Project, plunge readers into the controversies of the era as parson-hating biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, socialist Alfred Russell Wallace, free-market capitalists and radical atheists bent Darwinism to their own purposes.

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The authors avoid any kind of retrospective analysis at all and their account of Darwin's life and work is strictly chronological.

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zouden said:

Getting back on topic: having read some of the book, can you explain again why evolution is not a scientific theory? So far I haven't seen any reasons why it's not.

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In order to understand Popper's philosophy--and from now on I shall present the mature position, ignoring developments, debts and other sidelights--it is best to go straight to its heart and to the fact that Popper was determinably and absolutely a realist.  This is one of those terms which can mean anything to anybody, as can its opposite, idealist, so let me say that for Popper at a very minimum realism mean that the world exists and that it exists in some way independent of us.  Trees really do fall in the forests when no one is around to hear them.  They would do so even if no humans had ever existed past, present, or future.  The aim of science is to map reality; Popper speaks often of science as a "net" which tries to capture reality in its folds.

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The key concept in Kuhn's sparkling volume is that of a paradigm.  As friend and foe and pointed out many times, Kuhn means different things by this term at different times in the book.  But the chief sense is that of a work or body of work which captures scientific imagination--which commands allegiance from a group of workers and provides tasks for them to undertake (Kuhn 1962, 10):

    Aristotle's Physica, Ptolemy's Almagest, Newton's Principia and Optiks, Franklin's Electricity, Lavoisier's Chemistry, and Lyell's Geology--these and many other works served for a time implicitly to define the legitimated problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations.  They were able to do so because they shared two essential characteristics.  Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity.  Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.
    Achievements that share these two characteristics I shall henceforth refer to as "paradigms," a term that relates closely to "normal science."  By choosing it, I mean to suggest that some accepted examples of actual scientific practice--examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together--provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research.

Science which does not have a paradigm is properly considered immature.  It is in a "preparadigmatic state."  Once a paradigm has been found, then people can set to work--for Kuhn, science is as deeply a dynamic process as it is for Popper.  The paradigm sets the rules, it gives challenges, it marks out limits, and much more: it gives rise to "normal science."  This is the science that most scientists do all of their lives all of the time.  It is science where--and this is absolutely crucial for Kuhn--the paradigm is taken as a given, not to be challenged.  It is, in a sense, derivative or clean-up work.  "No part of the aim of science to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others" (24).  When you are working within the paradigm, there is nothing outside the picture.

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The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

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We don't care nearly as much about the origins of the Pygmy Goat

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Do not slight the pygmy goat!

Mr. Mushrooms said:

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The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

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Is that a scientific statement of fact, or mere philosophical conjecture?

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johnm214 said:

Mr. Mushrooms said:

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The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

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Is that a scientific statement of fact, or mere philosophical conjecture?

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You do this quite a bit.

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Evolution, in that sense, is no different.

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