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Comment by nessus42 | Hacker News Reader

Thomas Kuhn, the famous philosopher and historian of science (and physicist by training), wrote all about this back in 1962 when he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This book brought us the term "paradigm shift", which he argued typically only happened when older scientists retired, leaving younger scientists to pursue avenues of research that disagreed with the entrenched orthodoxy, without the threat of being denied tenure.

I.e., science as never been the direct route from hypothesis to proven theory that they teach us in high school.

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Remember when relativity didn't need a generation of physicists to die before it was accepted? How about quantum mechanics?

The big problem I have with Kuhn's idea of paradigm-shift-by-mass-retirement is that there are a bunch of examples in the past century of really big upsets in a number of fields that were accepted without dramatic wailing and gnashing of teeth. They just don't get mentioned so much when the idea of paradigm shift comes up -- classic confirmation bias.

(If you want to see big changes in action today, look at molecular biology. Now there is a lively field! It's kind of disconcerting how often they have to update their textbooks, especially at higher levels.)

I'm not sure that it would be correct to interpret Kuhn as stating that paradigm shifts only occur upon death. His point was rather than science often doesn't proceed in the orderly way that we've typically been led to believe. Often does not preclude sometimes, or even frequently.

I don't know much about molecular biology (other than currently working on RNA Interference now for a living), but sometimes, I imagine, that there is just too much solid data for a shift, that the orthodoxists don't need to die to see the light. Or maybe these putative shifts don't really involve shifting your entire mindset, which was required for things like the shift from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics, or the shift from behavioral psychology to cognitive psychology. Kuhn's model of paradigm shift only applies if the paradigm has to change--not if there's just a lot of churning of the facts.

The shift from behaviorism to cognitivism was one that occurred relatively recently in the history of science, and it certainly involved dramatic wailing and the gnashing of teeth. In fact, there are still behaviorist holdouts.

Re relativity and quantum mechanics, these would be two of Kuhn's prime examples, so I'm not sure what you are saying with respect to them. Einstein didn't win a Nobel Prize for Relativity, because it still wasn't accepted well enough even all those decades later, when he did win his Nobel prize.

A current dramatic shift in biology (with wailing and the teeth and everything) is the fight between the people who favor group selection vs. the people who think group selection is bollocks and kin selection is to be preferred.

This has been going on for the last 50 years, with kin selectionists "winning", but E. O. Wilson recently published a book defending group-selection which Richard Dawkins ripped apart, so right now the fight has come back.

Check out this article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-wilson/richard-daw...

I think we don't see any major paradigm shifts in molecular biology (or my field, bioinformatics) because these aren't "declarative" per se, but rather "explorative" - meaning that there are no big theoretical frameworks like evolutionary biology has, but rather tiny steps of fiddling around in the dark and _then_ using theory to explain what was found.

Maybe I'm misreading your first sentence, but both relativity and quantum mechanics did require a generation of physicists to retire before their acceptance reached consensus. Even some of the proponents of quantum mechanics questioned its validity.

> How about quantum mechanics?

That's actually the example Kuhn uses! And Kuhn didn't originate the idea in that case. He quotes Max Planck, one of the originators of quantum physics, who said something similar in his autobiography, about how quantum physics only came to be accepted after the old guard died out: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

typically only happened when older scientists retired

There is a much less subtle quote attributed to Max Planck that summarizes this idea: Science progresses funeral by funeral.

I had actually written "died off" rather than "retired", as that's how I recalled it being stated when I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But then I couldn't recall a good reason why they had to die, and not just retire, so I changed the wording. But maybe even retired tenured scientists exert too much influence.

I love the Max Planck quote, though. I hadn't heard it before.

My bad theory is that Thomas Kuhn's theory of "paradigm shift" itself could be an example of bad theory as presented in the original article. As in, there might not be too tough to find a few obvious counter examples, essentially (proving?) the theory wrong...

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