 The importance of investigative practices highlighted by Weber is also emphasized by Ingo Brigandt (2010). He suggests that the content of theoretical concepts consists of three elements: a concept’s reference; its inferential role, which he construes similarly to Kitcher’s reference potential; and its epistemic goal, which he specifies as the theoretical, explanatory, and investigative aims that are facilitated using a given concept. Brigandt argues that change of or variation in the inferential role of a concept is rational when the inferences or explanations supported by the revised concept support a given epistemic goal better than an earlier or an alternative version. The epistemic goals associated with a concept can change as well, typically, according to Brigandt, in a gradual manner. From this perspective, Brigandt reconstructs a continuous shift in the goals pursued by researchers using the gene concept, from classical genetics, which pursued the epistemic goal of predicting patterns of inheritance to molecular genetics’ focus on the goal of explaining how genes bring about their molecular products, through various intermediate goals, such as understanding the influence of genes on cell metabolism (see  §§1.2–1.3).  Furthermore, the account addresses the variety of gene concepts emerging in the last 30 years (see  §1.5).  While the epistemic goal connected to the gene concept in contemporary molecular genetics remains similar to that associated with the classical molecular gene, i.e., to elucidate how DNA contributes to functional RNA and protein, reference and inferential role are specific to various research contexts. More recent discussions of conceptual change in biology have not focused on genes, but on related concepts such as dominance (Shan 2020) or lineage (Neto 2020).