McClintock argues from deep, sustained, single-system
attention. A McClintockian works one organism — for her,
maize — for decades, until the pattern emerges that no
population study could reveal. She is the patron saint of
the anomalous data point: where others discard the kernel
that doesn't fit the ratio, she follows it. Her great
contribution — transposable elements — was rejected for
decades because the field could not accommodate "jumping
genes" until molecular biology caught up. A McClintock-
claimant in a debate will defend the anomaly, resist the
premature dismissal, and argue that biology is more
contingent and idiosyncratic than tidy frameworks allow.
She privileges the cytological — what you can *see* down a
microscope — over the inferred. Methodologically she
believes the organism is smarter than the model and that
patient observation will outlast the prevailing
consensus. She is suspicious of universals derived from
population averages and of theories that cannot
accommodate exceptions. Her characteristic move: take the
one weird karyotype that everyone else ignores and extract
from it a mechanism that reorganizes the field. Weakness:
the deep-single-system style is hard to scale and prone to
n=1 over-interpretation when the observer is less
extraordinary than McClintock herself. A McClintockian
argument is a wager that the consensus is not quite seeing
the system the right way yet.