348 CREATRT SCIENCE 



easy way out, the potential innovator may be emboldened to ques- 

 tion the indubitable, and to consider seriously the otherwise absurd. 

 In just this way, Copernicus was brought to consider the hypothesis 

 of a moving earth. 



Julian Huxley argues that some Lamarckian appearance to e\^olu- 

 tion by natural selection is readily understandable. As, in the struggle 

 for survival, an organism strains to the limit some capacity it already 

 possesses, it finds itself ideally placed "to take advantage of" a mu- 

 tational extension of that capacity— which might not otherwise be 

 fully used, and so genetically "fixed." The straining of the capacity 

 does not produce the mutation; the straining of an older theoretic 

 pattern does not itself produce a new one. A further parallelism of 

 much deeper significance is suggested by Weizsacker's comment that 



. . . even if someone came today who knew the answer to all un- 

 solved problems, we should not understand him if our own need had 

 not already driven us to put the questions which he answers. No help 

 comes where a need has not even been felt. 



The feeling of such a need produces in the potential innovator a 

 general lowering of the TI— an enhanced receptivity to novelty, both 

 conceptual and empirical. The gun so primed by uneasiness, a trigger 

 discovery may now release the conceptual explosion in which the 

 older pattern of thought is abruptly restructured. De Broglie pro- 

 vides a vivid sketch of the entire de\'elopment as it is experienced by 

 "the inventive theoretician." 



No longer does he dismiss the gaps in previous theories as mere 

 anomalies that will disappear when they are correctly fitted into the 

 field as a whole, but rather as a shortcoming of the theories them- 

 selves. His keen interest aroused, he becomes aware of a mass of small 

 and apparently unconnected facts and he begins to suspect hidden 

 relationships that can only be explained by a theory based on en- 

 tirely new ideas. Thus a geologist, surveying a vast region formed by 

 recent alluvial deposits, and noticing the emergence of occasional out- 

 crops of granite, may suddenly suspect that here has emerged a deep 

 layer of ancient formations, once the shelf of the entire region, and 

 explaining its structure. Thus small facts that were apparently pure 

 accidents or anomalies suddenly appear as external signs of a previ- 

 ously unrecognized but fundamental unity. 



In perception we make a figure-ground distinction. In writing his- 

 tory we distinguish a "scientific revolution" from the build-up of the 



