In any case, the talk is wrong-headed because it drives you to concentrate on some people and events and downplay or ignore other people and events. The term is obviously taken by analogy from politics and even there it is doubtful that there are such things (at least that there are such things with common features) and in science likewise we have no reason to think that there are such things with common features. He thinks that the whole talk of scientific revolutions, something of an obsession by many historians and philosophers of science in the years after Thomas Kuhn’s engaging and influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), is deeply misleading. Historian Jonathan Hodge (2005) has been one of the strongest naysayers on this matter. In some respects, indeed, the process of analysis is still ongoing and unresolved. This chapter considers these issues by addressing these questions: Was there a Darwinian revolution? That is, was there a revolution at all? Was there a Darwinian revolution? That is, what was the specific contribution of Charles Darwin? Was there a Darwinian revolution? That is, what was the conceptual nature of what occurred on and around the publication of the Origin? I argue that there was a major change, both scientifically and in a broader metaphysical sense that Charles Darwin was the major player in the change, although one must qualify the nature and the extent of the change, looking particularly at things in a broader historical context than just as an immediate event and that the revolution was complex and we need the insights of rather different philosophies of scientific change to capture the whole phenomenon. In recent years, however, the very notion of a scientific revolution has come under attack, and in the specific case of Charles Darwin and his Origin of Species there are serious questions about the nature of the change (if there was such) and the specifically Darwinian input.
The Darwinian revolution is generally taken to be one of the key events in the history of Western science.