Article ID: CBB962592333

The Fate of the Method of ‘Paradigms’ in Paleobiology (2018)

unapi

An earlier article described the mid-twentieth century origins of the method of "paradigms" in paleobiology, as a way of making testable hypotheses about the functional morphology of extinct organisms. The present article describes the use of "paradigms" through the 1970s and, briefly, to the end of the century. After I had proposed the paradigm method to help interpret the ecological history of brachiopods, my students developed it in relation to that and other invertebrate phyla, notably in Euan Clarkson's analysis of vision in trilobites. David Raup's computer-aided "theoretical morphology" was then combined with my functional or adaptive emphasis, in Adolf Seilacher's tripartite "constructional morphology." Stephen Jay Gould, who had strongly endorsed the method, later switched to criticizing the "adaptationist program" he claimed it embodied. Although the explicit use of paradigms in paleobiology had declined by the end of the century, the method was tacitly subsumed into functional morphology as "biomechanics."

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Authors & Contributors
Sepkoski, David Christopher
Dresow, Max
Sheldon, Myrna Lynn Perez
Blum, Alexander
Wu, Yiyi
Weishampel, David B.
Concepts
Evolution
Paradigms
Biology
Revolutions in science
Paleobiology
Paleontology
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
Places
United States
Germany
France
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