Immunology

What is a theory (somatic mutation model) supposed to accomplish? What is the purpose of competing theories? When can you discard a theory? What constitutes "success?" These are obviously philosophical questions, and scientific philosophers have puzzled over them quite a bit. So my challenge to you this week is to address those questions - maybe after checking out some summaries of major philosophical contributions (for example Google Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and/or Imre Lakatos - or try a few websites that offer thumbnail accounts of their ideas; a good one is http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html.

After chewing this over a bit, ask how these two ideas (germ line versus somatic mutation) fit into these notions of competing theories and whether they were "successful." Offer your ideas of whether they were "falsified" (see Popper), were "regular science" that fell prey to "revolutionary science" (see Kuhn) or simply stopped yielding "progressive problem shifts" (see Lakatos).