Diagrams in biology

The author thanks Richard Burian for many helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.

See the collections edited by Taylor and Blum (1991) and Baigrie (1996).

Going beyond biology, Nersessian (1992) presents a valuable discussion of Clerk Maxwell's use of analogical diagrams and their role in conceptual change.

I use ‘visual representation’ as a generic term for external representations like pictures, diagrams, graphs; this is a distinct category from mental representations, including perceptions. I clarify the nature of visual representations in the next section.

Maienschein's (1991) study of E.B. Wilson's diagrams also shows that diagrams are not used just to reduce the amount of content conveyed.

For a detailed account of the semiotic analysis that grounds the distinction among diagrammatic types I report here, see Perini (2010).

Giere (1996) discusses reasoning with diagrams in geology, and stresses the fact that visual matching between diagrams plays a role in explaining why one supports another. My goal is not to show that visual matching is always irrelevant to reasoning with figures, but to show that it is not necessary.

Philosophers usually define arguments as sets of statements; here I assume that visual representations can be components of arguments. For demonstration that figures have at least one important feature needed to play such a role—the capacity to bear truth—see Perini (2005b).

The binding-change model of ATP synthesis was developed by Paul Boyer's group in the 1970's. Although some preliminary structural information, such as the Boekema study, was available in the 1980's, a detailed structure of the ATP synthase complex was not published until 1994.

Jens Skou received the other half, for the first discovery of an ion-transporting enzyme, the Na⁺ K⁺-ATPase.