Chuck Grimes wrote:
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> Hawkes argues, once the door of external causation is open, it allows
> Gould to go beyond Darwin and effect a paradigm shift.
Kuhn's phrase "paradigm shift" has caused endless nonsense among non-scientists, especially those in the so-called "humanities." Richard Levins, in the brief response that I fwd to the list, makes the point nicely: "I think Hawkes missed the boat in many ways. The first of which is worrying about Thomas Kuhn's question: is this or is it not a new paradigm? That will be settled later." There may be an extant instance in which a humanities professor has used "paradigm shift" without making an utter ass of him/herself, but I can't recall any such instance.
It is safest, unless one is both a professional scientist _and_ a professional historian/philosopher of science, simply not to use the concept. It seems utterly silly to me, anyhow, to call Einstein's 'overturning' of Newtonian gravity a paradigm shift -- that overturning occurred well within the house of physics. All of the "paradigm shifts" that make much sense are not shifts within a given physical or natural science but the "shift" constituted by the very origin of such science. Galileo/Newton constituted a paradigm shift from non-science to science. Relativity and Quantum mechanics are developments (though far-reaching ones) within the science that Galileo etc created.
"Science," however we define it, has to be judged by non-scientists (or scientists speaking from outside science), but that fact does not justify anyone in the kind of amateurish fumbling around exhibited by Hawkes, and it certainly doesn't justify the Nation's Book Review Editor.
Carrol