Response to Comments on “Globalization, Scientific Lexicons, and the Future of Biology”

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First and foremost I would like to express my gratitude to both the organizers of and participants on this panel. I am grateful for their attention, for the seriousness of their comments, and for their criticism. One criticism in particular recurs in several of these articles—namely, of the paucity of empirical evidence supporting my “position.” Let me say from the start that this criticism is clearly warranted. Before my article might even be considered to constitute an argument, or to elaborate a “position,” it would definitely require more evidence, more specificity, and better grounding in concrete examples. I readily grant all this. But I would like to suggest that my article is intended more as a provocation than as an argument. I do, of course, have positions—positions for which I have elsewhere argued extensively and that clearly motivate this attempt to provoke, all concerning the history of developmental biology. But my aim here is not so much to extend or repeat these arguments as it is to raise a kind of question not often considered in the conventional literature of the history and philosophy of science: How might the study of biological development have proceeded differently?

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