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if a person loses a limb as a child, and marries someone who also lost a limb, (their one-legged status thus being an acquired characteristic in each case) there is not any statistical increase in the likelihood of their children being born one-legged, or of succumbing to a limb loss during their lifetime. But the situation is different if one of them is born with a deformed leg – there is (and this was known to Darwin) a statistically significant increase in their children and/or grandchildren being born with a comparable deformity. Thus the ‘random mutation’ can be inherited; the acquired characteristic cannot.

The Darwinian theory supplanted the Lamarckian theory, except in the Soviet Union where Stalin favoured the Lamarckian theory on communist ideological grounds, and found an enthusiastic champion in Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898 – 1976) the Russian biologist whose Lamarckian doctrines effectively crippled Soviet agriculture and animal husbandry for a generation.

However a contemporary Australian biologist Ted Steele, late of the University of Wollongong and now working at an affiliate of the Australian National University in Canberra, contends he has scientific evidence in support of the Lamarckian thesis that acquired characteristics can (in some circumstances) be inherited. At first his findings attracted considerable interest and indeed were taken up in the semi-popular scientific journals such as Nature. However, as Steele and his small body of supporters contend, the biological establishment quickly closed ranks. Grant money dried up. He found it virtually impossible to publish. His supporters claimed that his applications for grants were rejected because the mandarins of biology (the enforcers) quietly put it round to their peers on the funding bodies that ‘of course Ted’s a crackpot’. They would look ridiculous if they funded his research.

I stress I have no personal knowledge of whether these claims are true. But I cite them as an example of what is incontrovertibly true (and pointed out by, among others, Kuhn); namely that enforcement of prevailing orthodoxy is a normal part of normal science, and that this enforcement is not a matter of a happy spontaneous consensus (rarely is this so) but of mandarin pressure, which becomes peer pressure, which shapes who is ‘in’, and who is ‘out’. The idea that the natural sciences represent a domain of free and open inquiry, invaded only by external pressures (e.g. from big business or big government) is an exotic myth which is also an official part of the culture, which is an inherent part of the prevailing paradigm.

A second and more naked contemporary example concerns climate change. Climate science does not have a paradigm in Kuhn’s sense. It draws on bits and pieces of other sciences, some of which e.g. meteorology are at a very early stage of development, so that no paradigm has yet emerged. But it does have its enforcer mandarins. In Britain the Royal Society, a historically established society of some of the most successful scientists and thinkers more broadly of the age, which appoints its own members. Two years ago it took the unprecedented step of writing to all British research funding authorities, governmental and private, public interest and commercial, urging them not to provide any financial support for any research predicated on the hypothesis that climate change may not be real, or that it may not be due in large part to human acti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。