Abstract : Thomas Kuhn, in his influential and classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, claims that revolutionary change in science is change in the “paradigm” of a particular scientific field, that is, change in the larger conceptual framework and even underlying philosophical framework that guides a scientific field. In Kuhn’s view, paradigms are essential: Paradigms constitute and determine scientific change; further, major innovators in science do not merely contribute new theories and discoveries but new paradigms which constitute and determine the nature of particular theories, ideas, the design of experiments, and also the use of scientific instruments in any particular scientific field. I seek to investigate whether Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA as the genetic material challenges Kuhn’s model of discovery and revolutionary change in science. I seek to show that Watson and Crick employed Gregor Mendel’s conception of the particulate nature of genetic information (instead of Aristotle’s early conception of blending inheritance); Watson and Crick stated that they employed Erwin Schrodinger’s speculative conception from his book What is Life?, that the genetic material would likely be a complex aperiodic crystal; Watson and Crick employed Linus Pauling’s framework of modeling complex molecules using indirect evidence (such as by X-ray crystallography by other researchers); unlike Pauling and other chemists and biochemists that still thought the genetic material would be a protein, Watson and Crick recognized that the genetic material could be the DNA, and that the structure and function of DNA could provide information for the building blocks of cells and cellular differentiation. Thus, Watson and Crick’s scientific revolution employed multiple frameworks from related branches and sub-branches of science. Kuhn suggests that paradigm changes in physics and other branches of science are analogous to singular framework changes in the nature of perspective in the history of art and architecture. By contrast, Watson and Crick’s scientific revolution involves multiple frameworks, and is thus more comparable to futurism and futuristic art. (The Futuristic art of Boccioni, Picasso, and Malevich is said to involve multiple perspectives and frameworks).
Stevens Christopher Portosa (Mon,) studied this question.