忽悠型术语

武夷山

Heidi Ledford在2008年10月22日出版的《自然》杂志发表文章，Language：Disputed Definitions（语言：有争议的定义），文章说，人们喜欢把一些老术语改造 (makeover) 成为响亮的新术语，好比服装、鞋子也可以翻新一样。她文章里举的几个例子是：

过去说核磁共振，现在说核磁成像；

过去说临床研究，现在说转化医学；

通俗地说是克隆，偏要说somatic cell nuclear transfer（体细胞核转移）；

过去说基因工程，现在说合成生物学……

博主：您对她举的几个例子也许有不同意见，但这个现象的存在是不用争议的。在我们这个行当，过去说是文献分类，现在就是堂而皇之的“知识组织”了！

相关阅读

1.       武夷山，再谈“唬人的词语”，http://bbs.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1557&do=blog&id=289759；

2.  武夷山，政治正确与学术正确的话语，http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1557&do=blog&id=387532；

3.  武夷山，从媒体的“政治正确”说起，http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=1557&do=blog&id=258312。

Heidi Ledford的原文如下（http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081022/full/4551023a.html）：

Published online 22 October 2008 | Nature455, 1023-1028 (2008) | doi:10.1038/4551023a

News Feature

If you want to start an argument, ask the person who just said 'paradigm shift' what it really means. Or 'epigenetic'. Nature goes in search of the terms that get scientists most worked up.

This article is best viewed as a PDF.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY N. DEWAR

To a great extent, science is about arriving at definitions. What is a man? What is a number? Questions such as these require substantial inquiry. But where science is supposed to be precise and measured, definitions can be frustratingly vague and variable.

Here, Nature looks at some of the most difficult definitions in science. Some are stipulative definitions, created by scientists for their convenience, but on which the community has not found consensus. Popular though they are, not everyone agrees on what is meant by 'paradigm shift' or 'tipping point'.

Essential definitions — those that get at the question of what makes a thing a thing — can be just as troublesome. What is race, or consciousness? And does it even matter if there is no agreed-on meaning?

The good news is that for every troublesome term there are thousands used every day with no problems. Scientists are competent, if unconscious wielders of definition, says Anil Gupta, a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, "just as one can walk quite happily without having a complete account of walking".

Paradigm shift (noun.)

Emma Marris

Paradigm shift has a definite origin and originator: Thomas Kuhn, writing in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued against the then prevalent view of science as an incremental endeavour marching ever truthwards. Instead, said Kuhn, most science is "normal science", which fills in the details of a generally accepted, shared conceptual framework. Troublesome anomalies build up, however, and eventually some new science comes along and overturns the previous consensus. Voilà, a paradigm shift. The classic example, Kuhn said, is the Copernican revolution, in which Ptolemaic theory was swept away by putting the Sun at the centre of the Solar System. Post-shift, all previous observations had to be reinterpreted.

Kuhn's theory about how science works was arguably a paradigm shift of its own, by changing the way that academics think about science. And scientists have been using the phrase ever since.

In a postscript to the second edition of his book, Kuhn explained that he used the word 'paradigm' in at least two ways (noting that one "sympathetic reader" had found 22 uses of the term). In its broad form, it encompasses the "entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques and so on shared by the members of a given community". More specifically it refers to "the concrete puzzle-solutions" that are used as models for normal science post-shift.

Scientists who use the term today don't usually mean that their field has undergone a Copernican-scale revolution, to the undying annoyance of many who hew to Kuhn's narrower definition. But their usage might qualify under his broader one. And so usage becomes a matter of opinion and, perhaps, vanity.

The use of the term in titles and abstracts of leading journals jumped from 30 papers in 1991 to 124 in 1998, yet very few of these papers garnered more than 10 citations apiece¹. Several scientists contacted for this article who had used paradigm shift said that, in retrospect, they were having second thoughts. In 2002, Stuart Calderwood, an oncologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, used it to describe the discovery that 'heat shock proteins', crucial to cell survival, could work outside the cell as well as in². "If you work in a field for a long time and everything changes, it does seem like a revolution," he says. But now he says he may have misused the phrase because the discovery was adding to, rather than overturning, previous knowledge in the field.

Arvid Carlsson, of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden stands by his use of the phrase. "Until a certain time, the paradigm was that cells communicate almost entirely by electrical signals," says Carlsson. "In the 1960s and '70s, this changed. They do so predominantly by chemical signals. In my opinion, this is dramatic enough to deserve the term paradigm shift." Few would disagree: base assumptions were overturned in this case, and Carlsson's own work on the chemical neurotransmitter dopamine (which was instrumental in this particular shift) earned him the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Unless a Nobel prize is in the offing, it might be wise for scientists to adopt the caution of contemporary historians of science and think twice before using a phrase with a complex meaning and a whiff of self promotion. "Scientists all want to be the scientists that generate a new revolution," says Kuhn's biographer, Alexander Bird, a philosopher at the University of Bristol, UK. "But if Kuhn is right, most science is normal science and most people can't perform that role."

(See Don't get us started.)

Epigenetic (adjective.)

Helen Pearson

No one denies that epigenetics is fashionable: its usage in PubMed papers increased by more than tenfold between 1997 and 2007. And few deny that epigenetics is important. What they do disagree on is what it is.

"The idea is that there is a clear meaning and that it's being violated by people like me who use it more loosely," says Adrian Bird at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Last year he suggested this as a definition: "the structural adaptation of chromosomal regions so as to register, signal or perpetuate altered activity states"³. But this wide-ranging proposal, which takes on-board pretty much every physical indicator of a gene's activity is "preposterously dumb", says Mark Ptashne of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who has published his own take on the word's usage⁴. "I've grown to be very careful about using the term," says Bing Ren, who studies gene regulation at the University of California, San Diego.

According to the 'traditional' definition that Ptashne favours, epigenetics describes "a change in the state of expression of a gene that does not involve a mutation, but that is nevertheless inherited in the absence of the signal or event that initiated the change". The classic example is found in a bacteriophage called Lambda, which stays dormant in the genome of generations of cells through inheritance of a regulatory protein. These sort of processes are basic to some of the most pressing questions in biology today: such mechanisms are needed to explain how a single-celled embryo can generate cells that are genetically identical, but express a different array of genes and hence take on different jobs in blood, brain or muscle for generation after generation.

Over the past few years, however, all kinds of processes associated with gene control have been subsumed under the moniker. For example, 'epigenetic' is often used to refer to the chemical modification of histones — proteins that DNA winds around — which is involved in gene regulation. This infuriates those who learned the classical definition; they say it puts these modifications at the heart of development and disease despite scant evidence that they are inherited. "Why did histone marks become epigenetic?" says Kevin Struhl at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "People decided that if they call them that it makes them interesting." Others say that it is not about making things sound important, it is more the lack of any other phrase with which to collectively refer to this type of work.

The word had dual meanings long before the current debate. In the 1940s, Conrad Waddington used it to describe how the genetic information in a 'genotype' manifests itself as a set of characteristics, or 'phenotype'. In 1958, David Nanney at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, borrowed the term to describe "messy" inherited phenomena that could not be explained by conventional genetics⁵. "It was controversial in 1958 and everything died down and it has come alive again," says Nanney. "It took 40 years for epigenetics to become a major word in the vocabulary of modern biology."

“Epigenetics is a useful word if you don't know what's going on â

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