Abstract

Taking as starting point Kuhn’s analysis of science textbooks and its application to Sinnott and Dunn’s (1925), it will be discussed the problem of the existence of laws in biology. In particular, it will be showed, in accordance with the proposals of Darden (1991) and Schaffner (1980, 1986, 1993), the relevance of the exemplars, diagrammatically or graphically represented, in the way in which is carried out the teaching and learning process of classical genetics, inasmuch as the information contained in them, indispensable for the right development of that process, exceeds the information contained in the “laws” linguistically articulated and presented in the textbooks. However, it will be maintained that the information is implicit in the law that according to the structuralist concept of fundamental law and the reconstruction of genetics presented by Balzer & Dawe (1990), and later developed by Balzer & Lorenzano (1997) and Lorenzano (1995, 2000, 2002a) could be considered the fundamental law of classical genetics,the law of matching, clearly identified in this paper.