The 'idea' of man and… contemporary flora and fauna was thought to have been present from the first creation of life, perhaps in the mind of God…. "All the well-known pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories… had taken evolution to be a goal-directed process. "Though evolution… did encounter resistance, particularly from some religious groups, it was by no means the greatest of the difficulties the Darwinians faced," wrote Kuhn.
But he argued that all scientists should learn one of the lessons of the Darwinian revolution – that progress doesn't have to have a goal. Kuhn, a physicist, devoted few words to Darwin's transformation of life sciences. This slow spread of a new paradigm was typical of Kuhn's scientific revolutions. Not everyone accepted Copernicus: astronomer Tycho Brahe proposed a hybrid of Earth and sun-centred models. Copernicus assumed orbits were perfectly circular so he had to invoke epicycles. But his theory was far from complete – another feature invoked by Kuhn for his revolutions. In the early 1500s, Nicolaus Copernicus staked out a new paradigm: Earth and the planets moved around the sun, not vice versa. Later astronomers devised ever more complicated systems to account for the anomalies in their observations – a typical forerunner of a Kuhnian scientific revolution. But he could see that simple orbits could not account for the movements of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and proposed they moved in "epicycles", orbiting a point that was itself orbiting Earth.
Medieval Europe's astronomy was defined by Greco-Roman scholar Ptolemy, who thought the sun and planets orbited Earth.
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