Charney has written a highly valuable review and analysis of the important new empirical findings in genetics and epigenetics that, as he notes, represent significant Kuhnian anomalies for the population (quantitative) behavior genetics (PBG) paradigm. This review is a major contribution and should strongly impact on the progressing general shift in the science of genetics away from the anachronistic PBG paradigm to a postgenomic view. In this commentary we focus our remarks on the nature of scientific paradigms and scientific revolutions in an effort to facilitate a generalization and consolidation of Charney's suggestion of a paradigm shift.

As a first point concerning paradigm anomalies, we highlight the long history of both conceptual and empirical critiques of the multiple flaws (anomalies) associated with the PBG paradigm. These contributions to the story of anomalies, which in Kuhn's (Reference Kuhn1970) framework lead toward a scientific crisis for the paradigm, emerged from several fields, including biology (e.g., Lewontin Reference Lewontin1974; Reference Lewontin1991), anthropology (e.g., Ingold Reference Ingold, Rose and Rose2000), experimental psychology (e.g., Hirsch Reference Hirsch1967; Kamin Reference Kamin1974), and of special importance – considering its absence in Charney's review – developmental psychology/developmental science (Lerner Reference Lerner, Lerner and Lerner2006; Reference Lerner2012). Central to this latter field has been the conceptual and empirical work of Gilbert Gottlieb and his colleagues (e.g., Gottlieb Reference Gottlieb1997; Reference Gottlieb2003; Gottlieb et al. Reference Gottlieb, Wahlsten, Lickliter, Lerner and Lerner2006; Wahlsten Reference Wahlsten2012). Our own work on this topic began early (e.g., Lerner Reference Lerner1978; Overton Reference Overton1973) and has continued to the present (e.g., Lerner Reference Lerner, Coll, Bearer and Lerner2004; Reference Lerner2012; Overton Reference Overton, Coll, Bearer and Lerner2004; Reference Overton2011). And emerging within developmental science there has been over the past several years a series of important broadly based critiques of the PBG paradigm that are necessary readings for any full understanding of the breadth and depth of this paradigm's critical flaws (e.g., Greenberg Reference Greenberg2011; Ho Reference Ho, Hood, Halpern, Greenberg and Lerner2010; Jablonka & Lamb Reference Jablonka and Lamb2005; Joseph Reference Joseph, Hood, Halpern, Greenberg and Lerner2010; Lickliter & Honeycutt Reference Lickliter, Honeycutt, Blumberg, Freeman and Robinson2010; Meaney Reference Meaney2010; Moore Reference Moore2001; Partridge Reference Partridge2005).

This wealth of historical and contemporary literature arguably presents a sufficient case for that part of a scientific revolution that Kuhn (Reference Kuhn1970) termed a crisis (i.e., a breakdown of normal puzzle solving within a paradigm). But a scientific crisis is not sufficient for a paradigm shift. That is, contrary to Charney's suggestion that with sufficient anomalies “a new paradigm will emerge,” Kuhn points out that “once [it] … has achieved the status of a paradigm it is declared invalid only if an alternative candidate is available to take its place…. The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another” (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1970, p. 77, emphasis added). Thus, the relevant question is whether there is currently an alternative available paradigm that provides the formative context for Charney's postgenomic view, and, if so, what is it? Our answer is that there is, and has been, such a paradigm, and it has been broadly referred to as the relational developmental systems (RDS) paradigm (Lerner Reference Lerner, Lerner and Lerner2006; Reference Lerner2011; Lerner & Overton Reference Lerner and Overton2008; Overton Reference Overton, Lerner and Lerner2006; Reference Overton and Overton2010; Reference Overton and L'Abate2012).

For Kuhn, “paradigm” had two distinct meanings: one narrow, one broad. The narrow meaning he termed exemplars (i.e., “concrete problem-solutions”) or methodological ways the science is actually conducted. Clearly both Charney's review and the abovementioned literature present a number of exemplars that would appear to differentiate PBG from some alternative postgenomic paradigm (e.g., the computation of heritability indices and gene association studies versus the experimental analysis of causal pathways). It is in the broader meaning of paradigm, however, that we find the specific nature of this alternative paradigm. Kuhn called this broader meaning the disciplinary matrix, and a key feature is that it entails shared metaphysical beliefs – “from heuristic to ontological models … [which] supply the group with preferred or permissible analogies and metaphors (1970, p. 184).” In other words, following Charney, here we have “key assumptions concerning … the nature of the phenomena” under study.

The PBG paradigm is framed by a Cartesian–Newtonian mechanistic ontology. According to this disciplinary matrix, the world is ultimately composed of stable split-off pure forms or elements (e.g., the genotype) that combine, always in an additive fashion, to constitute the world of appearance (e.g., the phenotype). The split-off pure forms permit context free definitions and context-free identifications of objects and events. The combining of elements is often termed interaction, but the meaning of this term simply entails multiple additions, as pure forms remain pure forms. In this world, activity is split off from form and treated as forces or causality that operate in a unidirectional and additive linear fashion (cause → effect). This is a world in which foundationism, atomism, and reductionism are bedrock concepts.

Contrary to Charney's suggestion that the postgenomic view “has not yet coalesced around a core set of principles or assumptions characteristic of a paradigm” RDS is exactly the disciplinary matrix that frames the postgenomic view. The RDS paradigm asserts a relational ontology. This disciplinary matrix is holistic and dynamic. The world is conceived as a spontaneously active (dynamic), changing (developing), relational, holistic (integrated) system. Stability here is the exception rather than the rule. Systems are complex rather than simply complicated, often nonlinear and nonadditive, and through processes of self-organization and self-regulation, they grow (develop) increasing complexity. The relational nature of the system emphasizes causality as bi- or multidirectional (← →). All facets of the individual and the context exist in mutually influential relations (Elder Reference Elder, Lerner and Lerner1998; Molenaar Reference Molenaar2007). Accordingly, the potential for plasticity of intraindividual change is a hallmark of the RDS paradigm.

Organisms within the RDS paradigm are characterized as relational, complex, spontaneously active, self-creating (autopoetic), self-organizing, and self-regulating adaptive systems, with subsystems – from the genetic to the behavioral and sociocultural levels – composed of co-acting, co-developing processes functioning according to the reciprocal causality entailed by complex positive and negative feedback action loops. A final key feature of this paradigm – derived from its relational and holistic character – is that all behavior and development is contextualized and situated. There are no split-off discrete pure forms (e.g., pure gene, pure environment) operating in isolation or additively “interacting.”