In science and philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, the word "paradigm"has become strongly associated with the 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn, in which he described a paradigm shift as a major change in the way science is viewed and practiced. But paradigm has been used for a long time in a variety of ways in biology and other sciences and has been applied at a number of levels of biological organization. Claims for the creation of paradigms occur too frequently in the literature of biology for all of them to be considered as shifts in the way science is done or as revolutions in a scientific world view. Instead, frequent claims are made in the normal on-going business of science for a paradigmatic analysis of this concept or a paradigmatic application of that idea.

Examples of recent specific claims...