Paradigm | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Paradigm

In science and philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, the word "paradigm"has become strongly associated with the 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn, in which he described a paradigm shift as a major change in the way science is viewed and practiced. But paradigm has been used for a long time in a variety of ways in biology and other sciences and has been applied at a number of levels of biological organization. Claims for the creation of paradigms occur too frequently in the literature of biology for all of them to be considered as shifts in the way science is done or as revolutions in a scientific world view. Instead, frequent claims are made in the normal on-going business of science for a paradigmatic analysis of this concept or a paradigmatic application of that idea.

Examples of recent specific claims for paradigms in biology include: Drosophila as a paradigm for genetic sex determination; self-incompatability (the cellular recognition system that limits inbreeding) as a paradigm for the study of cell-to-cell communications in plants; identification of the smallest cell genome to provide a useful paradigm for thinking about the origin of cells; the use of social tutoring in white-crowned sparrows as a paradigm of song development in some species of birds; the lactose permease of Escherichia coli as a paradigm for membrane transport proteins; the relationship between sea otters and kelp forests in Alaska as a paradigm for community ecology.

These claims are not intended to reconstruct a broad pattern for thinking about the world scientifically, nor are they claims for a paradigmatic shift in science. Instead, they are claims for normal biological science, for particular methods in particular experiments that the researchers believe will prove to be useful in similar work. Most biologists, perhaps most scientists, then, commonly use the word paradigm to describe methods they see as exemplars, patterns worthy of imitation, or models to be adopted by other researchers doing similar work.

Kuhn used the term paradigm in much the same way as in the examples above, stressing that paradigms provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research. The study of such specialized paradigms is what prepares science students for membership in their particular scientific fields. But he also stressed paradigm shifts, a process in which the accumulating knowledge in a field slowly but clearly indicates weaknesses in a dominant or central paradigm of that discipline, resulting in its being discarded and replaced by a new dominant paradigm.

Such Kuhnian claims have been made for paradigm shifts in biology. The most obvious example is that most biologists now agree that Darwin's account of evolutionary change precipitated a paradigm shift in the way scientists view nature and how it works. A theory of autopoiesis has recently emerged as a paradigm meant to address the questions of what a living system is and what cognition is. Holism is considered by some scientists, especially in ecology, as an emerging paradigm complementing (though not replacing) the established reductionist world-view of many biologists. A recent issue of the journal Nature claimed that molecular biology, in which DNA sequences can now be worked out nearly completely, should be considered the latest such paradigm shift. If none of these fit exactly the sequence described by Kuhn, their emergence has certainly shaped the way research is done in the multiple disciplines of biology, and the way biologists view their science.