Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology

This detailed history and analysis of the work of biologists Ross G. Harrison, Joseph Needham, and Paul Weiss explores the development of organicism by each. Using Thomas Kuhn's concept of paradigm change as the starting point of her analysis, Donna Haraway emphasizes the role of model, analogy, and metaphor in the paradigm and argues that any fruitful theoretical system in biology rests upon a central metaphor.