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However there is more to a paradigm than these two defining features; it also begets a culture. This culture includes a set of shared beliefs about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable scientific conduct, and what are appropriate and what are inappropriate methods. These beliefs are enforced and maintained by mandarins within the paradigm culture, who function (although they do not think of their function in this way) as maintenance engineers of the paradigm. They are people who emerge within the culture (possibly by some process of internal selection, although often self-appointed) as its enforcers. Their job is to reward and advance the upholders of the paradigm and to punish the deviants.

This can be illustrated with two real life modern examples. The first concerns Evolution. Evolutionary theory is the paradigm within which all biological and genetic research today takes place. Central to that paradigm is the theory of natural selection, or simply Darwinian evolutionary theory. (Sometimes I read Kuhn as saying Darwinian evolution is today’s paradigm, although it is to my mind far more plausible to regard the paradigm as Evolutionary Theory, within which the dominant theory is the theory of natural selection. This is by the way an indication of what critics say is the vagueness or instability of Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm.)

Evolutionary theory is the theory that new species come into existence by evolving from pre-existing species. As a paradigm it supplanted Biblical Creationism and its associated doctrine of the fixity of species – that all species came into existence through an act of creation by God. The first theory within the evolutionary paradigm was not Darwin’s but that of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Monet Lamarck (1744 – 1829). Lamarck’s hypothesis was that, in the struggle for survival, some members of the species are able to develop skills and techniques (which often have a physical impact on their characteristics) which make them much more adaptive, so that their chances of survival are much greater. These successful adapters increasingly interbreed (possibly because there comes a point where they are the only survivors) and their descendants are born with the adaptive characteristics, thereby ensuring the continuation of the ‘new species’.

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882), the British naturalist, accepted two planks of Lamarckian evolution theory – the doctrine of the struggle for survival, and the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. But, like most other naturalists at the time, he rejected Lamarck’s doctrine that the acquired characteristics that gave the survivors a competitive advantage were transmitted from one generation to the next. He rejected it because all the experimental evidence suggested that a characteristic acquired by a member of a species post-natally could not be transmitted to the next generation. So Darwin replaced the doctrine that the adaptive characteristics were acquired within the lifetime of the first generation, with the doctrine of random mutations. Most random mutations are maladaptive (e.g. deformities) but a few emerge (over a long period of time) that are highly adaptive. Although the mechanism of transmission was not clear to Darwin the fact that it could occur was clear. After all, 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。