Scientific Paradigms

1. According to Thomas Kuhn, What are scientific paradigms and how do they function? Choose one of Jonathan Wells’ icons of evolution (any one of your choice) and show how this particular icon could be understood as demonstrating the paradigmatic status of modern Darwinian evolutionary theory.
According to Thomas Kuhn, normal science is this idea of puzzle solving where scientists take past achievements and base their research on that achievement. The achievements are acknowledged for a certain period of time making them paradigms. Instead of calling what scientists were studying or achieving, knowledge, Kuhn talks about how there are paradigm shifts. It is about building on ideas, but revolutions are not common with paradigms. In order
When we created research questions for each theory, we found that the observations were pretty consistent. Data can only be evidence because it is being interpreted under the light of the paradigm. In the end the paradigm decides what questions are relevant. Another example of a paradigm is looking at it like it’s the cover of a jigsaw puzzle, where scientists already know the answer but they don’t know how all the pieces come together. They can verify their data with the paradigm, thus making the data evidence towards a specific paradigm. However these paradigms can change when they create anomalies. These anomalies cannot be ignored, which irritates many scientists because they want to stay with the old paradigm but it’s already changing. This also means that these paradigms are never challenged against another one; they are never competing. Kuhn’s idea of paradigms has led to many taking a closer look at the “evidence” behind
There was a strong link between common descent and homology in Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Those who call themselves Darwinists, changed the meaning of homology so that it means something has inherent features from a common ancestor (Wells 61). However, this now left the evidence of homology using common descent incomplete because now they were using homology which actually means common descent to show evidence for homology, which is circular reasoning. This is similar to the idea that modern evolutionary theory is now paradigmatic because it’s taking a set of information and manipulating it so that it fits the criteria of what you are trying to prove. This is similar to the idea of how paradigms control what questions are asked and how evidence is interpreted under the light of the paradigm. Darwinists changed the definition of homology in order to make it more concrete as evidence of common descent to prove Evolution, but it only made their argument invalid because common descent means