Thinking about biology: An introductory essay

No science has ever been done without a sustained and far-reaching imaginative effort. The images, myths, and patterns of ideas become, in due time, sedimented into coherent discourse, formulae, golden rules of work—in brief, what we identify as normal science. The naive picture of science as the steady, linear accumulation of true propositions by the sheer weight of empirical evidence is most certainly false and gone with the nineteenth century. Indeed, the main outcome of the modern field of the history of science has been to settle that issue once and for all, starting with the work of Alexandre Koyre, and later followed by the widely read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. These historians of science, among many others, had the great merit of actually looking into the rich flows of the establishment of a concept in a particular discipline. Koyre dealt with the process of the origins of mechanics and Galileo’s physics. ⁸A more recent study has addressed, for instance, the emergence of immunology during Pasteur’s time, in all its sociological complexity. ⁹The message from these investigations has become unavoidable for all but the most recalcitrant empiricists: science is never done without an indissoluble link between theory and fact. Facts are made by the theoretical spectacles one puts 2on (the expression is Kuhn’s) just as much as theory is shaped by the results of empirical observations.