TY - JOUR T1 - Learning in organisations JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 785 LP - 785 DO - 10.3399/bjgp09X472746 VL - 59 IS - 567 AU - Neil Richardson Y1 - 2009/10/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/59/567/785.abstract N2 - In his essay The Face of Miranda,1 the eminent palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould explains how scientific theory can be overturned by new facts. A notion he proposed that planetary surfaces were a consequence of size and nothing else worked adequately for our local planets of Mars, Mercury, Earth and its moon. But more distant images from the unmanned Voyager spaceship revoked his theory.1 When Voyager approached Miranda, the smallest satellite of Uranus, a NASA scientist declared excitedly: ‘It's just mind-boggling … Miranda is what you get if you imagine taking all the bizarre geological features in the solar system and putting them all into one object.’Gould concluded a size hypothesis by itself was not strong enough ‘to overwhelm other influences’ and yield confident predictions. He wrote in his essay that theories about the surfaces … ER -