"Models of Data, Models and Structural Relationships in the History of Genetics"

LORENZANO, PABLO

Helsinki

Congreso; 15th Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science; 2015

Division of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science

Accordingto the most popular version of the history of genetics - the so-called "traditional account" (Olby 1979), "orthodox image" (Bowler1989), or "official story" (Lorenzano 2013) -, "classical" ("formal" or "Mendelian") genetics is a discipline whose history had been passed in a continuous, cumulative and linear way. Since its assumed origins with the work of Mendel, through the work of the so-called "rediscoverers" de Vries, Correns and Tschermak, and of the English Mendelian Bateson to the work of Morgan and his school, genetics had been passed - omitting some insignificant delays, though interesting from a historical point of view - without frictions. So much the problems and intentions of research of theaforementioned investigators as well as, in a higher or lower degree, the meaning of the fundamental concepts used by them and the conceptual systems out of which the concepts get their meanings, are assumed to be constant.Since more than thirty years the above interpretationis seriously discussed and questioned by historians of genetics, so that at the present time we have a wide variety of positions with respect to it from the suggestion of modification of some particular points to the whole revision of the traditional historiographic account. Among the historians of genetics, there are those that emphasized the existent discontinuities and ruptures between (at least some of) the developments carried out by the abovementioned investigators.The aim ofthis communication is to present an analysis of the history of genetics" - as well as continuities - that would allow to understand the existence of the "traditional account".For that we´ll make use of some metatheoretical concepts borrowed from the Structuralist View of Theories or Sneedian Structuralism (Sneed 1971, Balzer, Moulines & Sneed 1987, Moulines 2002).