Natural selection as defined by Charles Darwin has exerted a powerful influence on how we perceive our world. This theory holds that favorable characteristics in a species will persist in populations, while disadvantageous traits will be selected against via the death of unfit individuals from environmental pressures, such as predation, decreased availability of resources like nutrients and shelter, and natural processes such as drought; thus only individuals with the most advantageous traits survive. Many humans find this process highly intuitive and so intrinsic to our existence we dub it "natural", as if it is ubiquitous to our experience - and indeed, many processes surrounding us, not just those in nature, have successfully been compared
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Simply trying to define how knowledge changes within disciplines under the umbrella term of "Natural Selection" is hence short-sighted; if some aspects of the theory appear to fit, others cannot be reconciled with the particularities of how certain disciplines work. The process of scientific exploration seems to fit well into the metaphor of natural selection. On the basic level, a scientist 's job is to develop a theory which he then tests for correctness, similarly to how organisms with certain traits are subjected to selection pressures. Test results either support a theory or disprove it, and thus a theory may be accepted or discarded; this is akin to how an organism would survive if it exhibits an advantageous trait or die if it is "unfit". A theory previously considered correct may be shown to be false or unreliable under special conditions, as Einstein 's …show more content…
Although certain ideas may be judged and discarded based on a selection process, disagreements on how to apply the theory from the perspective of the pace of selection and inconsistencies in the selection process when applied to disciplines that rely on immutable faith and personal artistic preference mean that natural selection can seldom be used to describe every aspect of a discipline. As "natural" as the theory may seem to us from the outset, other manifestations of human nature, also "natural" to our lives, show that Darwin 's theory is not all-encompassing at all, and that human knowledge, as displayed in interactions within disciplines that we have created, in many ways transcend the basic selection process that other species
Simply trying to define how knowledge changes within disciplines under the umbrella term of "Natural Selection" is hence short-sighted; if some aspects of the theory appear to fit, others cannot be reconciled with the particularities of how certain disciplines work. The process of scientific exploration seems to fit well into the metaphor of natural selection. On the basic level, a scientist 's job is to develop a theory which he then tests for correctness, similarly to how organisms with certain traits are subjected to selection pressures. Test results either support a theory or disprove it, and thus a theory may be accepted or discarded; this is akin to how an organism would survive if it exhibits an advantageous trait or die if it is "unfit". A theory previously considered correct may be shown to be false or unreliable under special conditions, as Einstein 's …show more content…
Although certain ideas may be judged and discarded based on a selection process, disagreements on how to apply the theory from the perspective of the pace of selection and inconsistencies in the selection process when applied to disciplines that rely on immutable faith and personal artistic preference mean that natural selection can seldom be used to describe every aspect of a discipline. As "natural" as the theory may seem to us from the outset, other manifestations of human nature, also "natural" to our lives, show that Darwin 's theory is not all-encompassing at all, and that human knowledge, as displayed in interactions within disciplines that we have created, in many ways transcend the basic selection process that other species