Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About Laughing Out Loud)

The Darwinian Crack Up Will Be Televised

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Thomas Kuhn gave us a good description of how scientific paradigms collapse. He wasn’t really talking about the theory of evolution, but what he said applies to that theory, and applies by the shovelful.

When a new paradigm is adopted, there are a few anomalies that remain unexplained. Think of the new paradigm as a wagon, and of the anomalies as rocks that the wagon has to haul. As time progresses, the anomalies accumulate, which means that somebody is throwing extra rocks into the wagon. But the wagon has been hitched up, it is going down the road, and we just deal with it. Wagons carry rocks, that’s all. But over time, the number of rocks will become a matter of concern. And a little bit past that point, the performance of the wagon starts to suffer. And right after that, the wagon collapses, we buy a new wagon, and head on down the road. The new wagon, remember, has some rocks in it.

When Darwinism was first adopted, when we bought this wagon, our knowledge of the internal workings of the living cell was approaching zilch, nada, nuffin. For all we knew, the cell was a rind stuffed with a gelatinous substance. As our scientific knowledge has exploded, the wagon—still manfully teetering down the road—has filled up with rocks. Boulders. A couple of small mountains. Darwin died in 1882, and the term genetics was not born until 1905.

The more we learn, the more the wagon has to “carry.”