In a similar vein, I. Szumilewicz (although not stressing realism) insists that many
eminent scientists made it a main heuristic requirement of their research programs that
a new theory stand in a relation of 'correspondence' with the theory it supersedes.'
If Putnam and the other retentionists are right about the strategy that most scientists
have adopted, we should expect to find the historical literature of science abundantly
provided with proofs that later theories do indeed contain earlier theories as limiting
cases, or outright rejections of later theories that fail to contain earlier theories. Except on rare occasions (coming primarily from the history of mechanics), one finds neither of these concerns prominent in the literature of science. For instance, to the best of my knowledge, literally no one criticized the wave theory of light because it did not preserve the theoretical mechanisms of the earlier corpuscular theory; no one faulted C. Lyell's uniformitarian geology on the grounds that it dispensed with several causal processes prominent in catastrophist geology; Darwin's theory was not criticized by most geologists for its failure to retain many of the mechanisms of Lamarckian evolu-
tionary theory.