The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

The usual idea of science is based on a series of anecdotes. This has produced many misunderstandings about the real nature of science, which includes misunderstandings by scientists themselves. As the philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn has shown in his major and path-breaking work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the concept of science is usually seen as observations, laws and theories. This is an anti-historic approach. Science is not an accumulation of data. Science derives from a new way of looking at the same or similar phenomena. Different theories are part of a historic process in which a specific paradigm, or dominant view, is replaced by another, hence the expression "scientic revolutions". Scientific progress derives from this competition among competing theories. Accumulation of data per se is not as important as the way the data are explained in a complex theory. When we say "revolutions" this indicates that the same natural phenomenon or observation will be entirely differently explained as part of diverse theories. Astronomers and physicists could see the same celestial bodies but attach to them different behaviour and laws of movement. One of the greatest scientific revolutions was the abandoning of the theory that the sun rotates around the earth, aka the geocentric theory, for the heliocentric theory, that is the complete opposite: it is the earth to rotate around the sun. Here we have the great Polish man of the cloth and astronomer Nicholas Copernicus who revolutioned the geocentric view. New knowledge in science doesn't derive from change in observations or data but in the way these are part of different theories. After Copernicus there was another great mind, Galileo Galilei, scientist born in Pisa, Italy. He paved the way to the law of universal gravitation by the English Isaac Newton. Another major example of scientific revolution is in biology, where Charles Darwin adopted the theory of evolution through natural selection among animal species and opposed Lamark's theory of inheritance of acquired characters, which are developed by the animal's environment. These cannot be transmitted genetically because they don't form part of animal DNA, which is the only part of of the parents that is inherited by their offspring.