Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
methodological, and institutional apparatuses that emerge to sustain the
“normal science” undertaken to investigate established theoretical models.
Because these symbolic infrastructures of science need to be reworked when-
ever an established theory is supplanted, scientific revolutions can never
succeed at a merely intellectual level. Every scientific theory advances within
its own entourage of methodologies, grants, journals, departments, social
networks, and philosophical premises, and so all of these may be at stake
whenever an established theory is called into question.
39
The researcher
confronted by a new theory is not just being asked to amend or abandon
some outdated set of concepts but also to abandon the whole framework of
an older paradigm.
What I am calling a meta-paradigm consists of those constituent ele-
ments that sustain the scientific enterprise more broadly. To identify evo-
lutionism as the central feature of this meta-paradigm is not to say that a
mythologized evolutionary science by itself defines the contemporary sci-
entific identity and its place in the world. Like paradigms, meta-paradigms
are comprised by more than just the theories they sustain. Evolutionary
science, as the body of theory that has been symbolically enlarged to sustain
crucial beliefs about the scientific ethos, is evolutionism's central element,
but science's place in the world also depends upon many other things, such
as its established place in university curricula, formal lines of public and
private patronage, its prestige as a professional vocation, and the general
attitude of hopeful expectation that sustains its public support. In identify-
ing this meta-paradigm with evolutionism, I am only saying that mythical
representations of evolutionary science hold all of this together. Once evo-
lution becomes evolutionism, it sustains scientism, naturalism, and, most
importantly of all, the notion that science is the animating soul of natural
history. Evolutionism situates science within a closed system of ideas that
ensures science's worldly supremacy.
Those familiar with Kuhn's thesis will remember that established scien-
tific paradigms are a kind of mixed blessing, vitally needed for the contin-
ued work of “normal science” but just as vitally obstructive to “revolutionary
science,” to the emergence of new theories and the paradigm shifts that
sustain them. The same can be said of ideological meta-paradigm shifts.
The first scientific meta-paradigm, the one based in the Baconian natural
theology that I outlined in chapters 2 and 3, played a significant role in
making England safe for science, but it was also destined to become a cru-
cial obstacle that stood in Huxley's way two centuries later as he worked
