pt. 1. Gaston Bachelard's historical epistemology.--pt. 2. For a critique of epistemology.

This book discusses the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacobs considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches--focusing on visible structures, internal structures such as cells, evolution, genes, and DNA and other molecules- each have their own power but (...) also limitations. Fundamentally challenging how the history of biology is told, much as Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" did for the history of science as a whole. (shrink)