Unnatural Selection:Planck’s Principle and Evolutionary Scientific Change in the History and Philosophy of Science

Abstract

Max Planck famously wrote that, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because the opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Since then, people have interpreted this quote in several ways. This thesis seeks an evolutionary interpretation of the Planck quote and attempts to place it within a realm of evolutionary conceptions of scientific change. Prominent scholars in the history and philosophy of science have relied on evolutionary analogies to describe the growth of science yet often such metaphors are stretched to the point of uselessness if evolution simply becomes synonymous with 'change' or 'progress.' The paper shows why science, and ideas in general, exhibit evolutionary characterisitics, how people change their minds in science, and how this differs from non-scientific activities. Planck's Principle within a vision of evolving knowledge helps to demarcate scientific and non-scientific traits in humanity. Ultimately the role that Planck's Principle plays in the history and philosophy of science is one that rejects teleological notions of science and seeks to describe change in its most literal form, providing the discipline with a truism similar to how the phrase "survival of the fittest" became a rallying point behind early Darwinian evolutionary theory.