The doctorate, as a ritualised form of evaluation, has existed for more than eight centuries--initially linked to Western medieval forms of knowledge production framed by religion, and to the professional training of lawyers and doctors. It nearly disappeared at the end of the modern era. Recast as a requirement for academic professions, it proceeded to play an important role in the production of new knowledge and became a key to scientific and research development in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since less than half a century ago, doctoral education has gone through tremendous changes due to both the globalisation and standardisation of higher education and public policies designed to encourage knowledge transfers from academia to society at large. Doctoral education has become a crucial part of knowledge production and the transfer of knowledge into the broader economy, but it faces huge obstacles that can only be understood by taking into account the history of its transformations, the anthropological role it played and still plays, and also the controversial effect of efforts to standardise knowledge production, which goes against the non-standard nature of human knowledge creation.