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between the two accounts is unclear, because both Craver and Glennan incorporate
Woodward's views into their accounts of mechanism (Glennan 2002 ; Craver 2007 )
and because Woodward himself has described how interventionist accounts of
causation can be used as an account of mechanisms. Moreover, Glennan has argued
( 1996 , 2010 ) that mechanisms can serve as the basis for a theory of causation. So,
perhaps causal relevance and causal production (including mechanisms) are tightly
linked. Lindley Darden's chapter usefully explores some of the ways in which
causes might manifest themselves in mechanisms: activities of entities, stages of
mechanisms, or as start or setup conditions. On Darden's view, then, analyses of
“mechanism produces phenomenon” are much more detailed and specific than “ C
causes E ,” as the former incorporates many of the latter, plus other aspects such as
the ways in which entities and activities are organized.
A second sort of question arises as to which biological phenomena can be
profitably illuminated by accounts of causation and/or mechanisms; each of the
biology papers in this volume contributes partial answers to this question by
exploring causation and mechanism in different areas of biology. Once again,
however, we quickly realize that for every illumination, new questions are uncov-
ered. Several of the papers deal with causation and/or mechanisms in evolutionary
biology. Millstein, who has elsewhere ( 2006 ) argued that natural selection is a
population-level causal process, argues (contra Glennan) that the causation at the
population level exhibits causal production (in Salmon's sense) as well as causal
relevance (a point on which she and Glennan agree). But she does not take a stand
on whether natural selection should be understood as a mechanism, having else-
where (Skipper and Millstein 2005 ) raised concerns for such a claim. However,
Rong-Lin Wang offers some criticisms of Millstein's claim that natural selection is
a population-level causal process. For example, he argues that Millstein's account
of natural selection does not handle cases of what Elliott Sober has called “selection
of” (as distinguished from “selection for” and random drift). Moreover, he suggests
that prospects of the view that natural selection is a population-level causal process
depend on a satisfactory solution to each of the three problems: the redundant cause
problem, the overdetermination problem, and the epiphenomenon problem. Thus,
according to Wang, we need to pay attention to the work of metaphysicians in order
to understand the nature of selection. The other philosophy of biology papers,
discussed elsewhere in this Introduction, explore causation and mechanisms in
other aspects of evolutionary biology as well as other areas of biology such as
genetics, plant breeding, and biomedicine.
4 Economic Mechanism and Causality
A mechanism is often conceived as a machine, which is on the top of Craver and
Darden's ( 2005 ) list of ideas associated with the term mechanism. It is so because
machines provide models of intelligibility that have contributed to our understand-
ing of the mechanisms in the natural world. This understanding of mechanism in
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