Stephen Jay Gould was a controversial palaeontologist due to his belief in ‘Punctuated Equilibrium’. Whilst accepting that Natural Selection is usually slow, grinding, and gradual change, Gould also highlighted that the archaeological record was punctuated with wild collisions of change, like the Cambrian Explosion, which dramatically redraw the landscape of life.
The philosopher Thomas Kuhn similarly became infamous for his theory that describes how the scientific orthodoxy rarely changes from decade to decade, before abruptly undergoing a ‘Paradigm Shift’ in accepted scientific wisdom. For example, in 1543 the accepted world view of Cosmology switched from a Ptolemaic to Copernican one.
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George Smith
Digital strategist by day, political anorak by night. A proud father, and stunningly mediocre triathlete.
