As has been frequently remarked, Charles Darwin often used narratives to explain evolutionary change, as when he traced how the eye might have evolved from a patch of light-sensitive skin into a complex optical instrument. But narrative played a more fundamental role for Darwin, and one far less well-understood: narrative fundamentally informed the concepts out of which Darwin constructed his science. It is straightforward enough that Darwin's two most important conceptual innovations—natural and sexual selection—are narrative in structure. But Darwin also repeatedly took concepts that other natural historians had conceived as expressing static properties and reconceptualized them through a narrative lens. Taxonomists, for example, typically conceived affinity as a static relation of morphological similarity; Darwin reconceived affinity as a historicized relation of genealogical connection. He also took what other naturalists conceived as invariant laws of nature and reconceived them in narrative terms, as when he argued that Baer’s “laws” of unity of structure and unity of plan in embryology should be understood as consequences of processes of historical change. Darwin even offered narrativized reconceptualizations of sex, beauty, and morality. Finally, narrative structured the standards by which Darwin conceived that scientific hypotheses should be evaluated. In the place of John Herschel’s notion that a phenomenon is explained by breaking it into its component parts and offering a vera  causa (true cause) for each part, Darwin proposed that explanations be evaluated holistically for how they made sense of a wide array of disparate phenomena. Narrative, in short, suffused Darwin’s science.

Economists developed the concept of ‘marginal utility’ in the late-nineteenth century within several different ‘schools’ of economics.  Their ideas have been seen as sufficiently similar that historians of economics have sometimes taken this to be a case of simultaneous discovery - by four different economists (Menger, Clark, Jevons and Walras) in four separate countries (Austrian, America, Britain and France).  They are thought to have developed this notion out of an older tradition of thinking about ‘use-value’, and this may account for why the similarities in their versions stood out for later commentators.  Although they used the same labels, their accounts of utility were sufficiently different to make them conceptually distinct.  These four versions were each associated with different characteristics of individual and social behaviour, which had salience for the theoretical context in which they were embedded.  These characteristics are best revealed, and so traced, not in debates between the economists but rather in the separate narratives that they each told, first in introducing their version of ‘marginal utility’, and then in developing the characteristics of their concepts.  This comparison explores how such late-nineteenth century economists’ narratives provided not only the wrapping, but much of the substantive content and format of their concepts-in-development, as well as carrying important implications for the mode of reasoning thought allowable in using their different versions of the concept.

The paper will revisit the history of conceptual change regarding the role of genes in development, by exploring the methodology of analyzing narrative practices in research publications. Historians of biology have analyzed the role of metaphors: “field”, “information”, “program” and other concepts have been followed through merging and diverging discourses on development. Others, who emphasized the role of material practices, have shown how conceptual developments in biology are driven by the differential reproduction of experimental systems in which new entities emerge. Historians routinely use publications reporting experimental results and their interpretation as sources. To trace the historical shifts in question, I will address such texts more explicitly as sites of mediation between experimental practices and conceptual interpretation. For this purpose, it is useful to conceive of such texts as narratives, to highlight their constructed character and their ordering functions. The research narratives of geneticists selected experimental operations and observations and transferred them into the discursive realm, thus linking emerging concepts to epistemic objects. Furthermore, they often linked these experimentally specified concepts to conceptual structures imported from embryology in the interpretation of results. The latter thus function as narrative resources. Finally, their research narratives were reproduced differentially when geneticists reproduced and varied experimental systems. This perspective offers a fresh view on the history of developmental genetics. A series of research narratives that emerged in the context of the differential reproduction of experiments pursued between the 1950s and 1970s, which involved genetic mosaics and implicated genes in developmental processes will be analyzed.

In this paper, I discuss the case study of the concept ‘synapse’, focusing on a debate that took place during the mid- to late- 20th century. The ‘war of the soups and sparks’, in which scientists attempted to determine whether synaptic transmission is electrical or chemical, had just ended. The resolution of the battle over facts, however, cleared the way for a new battle – one that was fought over concepts. Specifically, scientists disagreed about the extension of the concept ‘synapse’: while some argued that the term should apply exclusively to chemical junctions, others maintained that it should extend to electrical junctions, as well.
I analyze the work of neuroscientists from both sides of the debate, most prominently Harry Grundfest and Michael Bennett. I show that what was at stake, for them, was not merely terminology. Rather, each of these alternative conceptualizations was intertwined with the production of a narrative explanation. First, each taxonomy brought to the foreground distinct similarities and dissimilarities, highlighting specific ‘why’ or ‘how’ puzzles that arose from these relations. Each taxonomy, therefore, reflected not only the integration of known facts about the objects of investigation, but the scientist’s views about the most pressing and interesting questions to be asked. Second, these taxonomic juxtapositions illustrated a preliminary roadmap for solving such puzzles through empirical research. Thus, the alternative conceptualizations of ‘synapse’ each build upon – and, in turn, contribute to – the production of narrative explanations.