ABSTRACT
For well over a hundred years, and perhaps longer, people have been using biological models to illustrate and explain scientific change. The most obvious, and probably the most common, is one which sees change in science as being akin to change through time in organic life – that is to say, as being ‘evolutionary’ (Campbell 1972). The best-known, indeed notorious, exponent of this theme was the nineteenth-century English writer, Herbert Spencer. So enthused was he with this idea, he even saw the connection between scientific change and organic evolution as no mere analogy but a manifestation of one greater all-encompassing general law of the universe. (For Spencer's own views, see especially his famous essay ‘Progress: Its law and cause’, first published in 1857; also Spencer 1904. Comments on Spencer include Ruse (1986) and Richards (1987).)
