Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

organisms, proposed that biology would itselfbecome the science to which sciences of the mindand society would be reduced. Although the formerproject no longer attracts much philosophicalinterest and the latter has been periodicallyfashionable (first as cybernetics, now as complexitytheory), neither captured the actual strategy bywhich biology consolidated as the science we knowtoday.Instead, practising biologists followed the lead ofthe Russian Orthodox Christian, US-based geneticistTheodosius Dobzhansky (1900–75), whose1937 book, Genetics and the Origins of Species, arguedthat biology could achieve an intra-disciplinaryunification – what is now known as the Neo-Darwinian synthesis – without either subordinatingitself to physics or lording over the humansciences. As Dobzhansky saw it, the main obstacleto biology’s scientific autonomy was that naturalselection appeared to be purely destructive andwasteful, leaving only a trail of extinct species andunrealised genetic potential in its wake. However,Dobzhansky argued, natural selection is not auniform force that beats genetic variation intoadaptive submission. Rather, it moves diffusely,placing specific environmental pressures on particulargene pools. Thus, natural selection reveals acreative side, akin to an ‘invisible hand’, that80