"For many… the abolition of that teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin's suggestions. The 'idea' of man and… contemporary flora and fauna was thought to have been present from the first creation of life, perhaps in the mind of God….
"All the well-known pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories… had taken evolution to be a goal-directed process. The term ‘paradigm shift’ brings to mind quite a violent process of almost instantaneous change. "Though evolution… did encounter resistance, particularly from some religious groups, it was by no means the greatest of the difficulties the Darwinians faced," wrote Kuhn. The term ‘paradigm shift’ has been borrowed from Thomas Kuhn ( 1962, 1977) and refers to a major shift of methodological approach or epistemic thought that can occur in science. But he argued that all scientists should learn one of the lessons of the Darwinian revolution – that progress doesn't have to have a goal. Kuhn, a physicist, devoted few words to Darwin's transformation of life sciences. This slow spread of a new paradigm was typical of Kuhn's scientific revolutions. Not everyone accepted Copernicus: astronomer Tycho Brahe proposed a hybrid of Earth and sun-centred models. Science has a paradigm that remains constant before going through a paradigm shift when current theories can’t explain some phenomenon, and someone proposes a new theory. Copernicus assumed orbits were perfectly circular so he had to invoke epicycles. Reviewed by Olivia Guy Evans Summary Thomas Kuhn argued that science does not evolve gradually toward truth. But his theory was far from complete – another feature invoked by Kuhn for his revolutions. In the early 1500s, Nicolaus Copernicus staked out a new paradigm: Earth and the planets moved around the sun, not vice versa. Later astronomers devised ever more complicated systems to account for the anomalies in their observations – a typical forerunner of a Kuhnian scientific revolution. But he could see that simple orbits could not account for the movements of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and proposed they moved in "epicycles", orbiting a point that was itself orbiting Earth. Medieval Europe's astronomy was defined by Greco-Roman scholar Ptolemy, who thought the sun and planets orbited Earth.
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