Perspectives on Science
Volume 29, Issue 1
January-February 2021
February 01 2021
Interpreting the History of Evolutionary Biology through a Kuhnian Prism: Sense or Nonsense?
Koen B. Tanghe, Lieven Pauwels, Alexis De Tiège, Johan Braeckman
Author and Article Information
Koen B. Tanghe
Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Universiteit Gent, Belgium
Lieven Pauwels
Department of Criminology, Criminal Law and Social Law, Universiteit Gent, Belgium
Alexis De Tiège
Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Universiteit Gent, Belgium
Johan Braeckman
Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Universiteit Gent, Belgium
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive review, as well as the editor Alex Levine.
Online Issn: 1530-9274
Print Issn: 1063-6145
© 2021 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Perspectives on Science (2021) 29 (1): 1–35.
https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00359
Abstract
Traditionally, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history of evolutionary biology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match between this model and the history of evolutionary biology but, more importantly, also sheds new light on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the construction of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the chronic discontent with it, and the latest expression of that discontent, called the extended evolutionary synthesis. Lastly, we also explain why this kind of analysis hasn’t been done before.
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