Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
1.
INTRODUCTION
The reference to systems in the name systems biology points to a holistic
emphasis that opposes an extreme reductionistic, mechanistic approach to biol-
ogy that champions the decomposition of biological systems into their molecular
constituents and emphasizes such constituents in explanations of biological phe-
nomenon. For some theorists who adopt the name systems biology (see, for
example, van Regenmortel, 2004; Kellenberger, 2004) this entails repudiating
the whole tradition of mechanistic biology. On this view, only by maintaining
a focus on the whole system in which biological phenomena occur can one
hope to understand such phenomena. Many other advocates of systems biol-
ogy, including the editors of this volume (Boogerd et al., 2002; Boogerd et al.,
2005; Bruggeman et al., 2002; Bruggeman, 2005), view the focus on systems
as providing an important corrective to overly reductionistic mechanism, but
construe the resulting understanding to be compatible with a mechanistic per-
spective. To evaluate the fate of mechanism within systems biology requires us
to examine carefully the commitments of mechanism. Mechanism, I will argue,
has the conceptual resources to provide an adequate philosophical account of the
explanatory project of systems biology, but it can do so only by placing as much
emphasis on understanding the particular ways in which biological mechanisms
are organized as it has on discovering the component parts of the mechanisms
and their operations.
For philosophy of science, the emergence of antimechanistic voices in biology
is ironical as philosophers of science have only recently recognized and appreci-
ated the ubiquity of appeals to mechanism in biological explanations and offered
models of explanation in terms of mechanisms (Bechtel & Richardson, 1993;
Glennan, 1996; 2002; Machamer et al., 2000; Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2005). 2
These accounts of mechanistic explanation (which I discuss in Section 2) attempt
to capture what biologists themselves provide when they offer explanations
of such phenomena as digestion, cell division, and protein synthesis. Like the
biological accounts on which they are modeled, the philosophical accounts of
mechanisms have tended to focus more on the component parts and operations
in mechanisms than on how they are organized. Thus, while these accounts have
identified organization as an important aspect of any account of a mechanism,
they have not focused on the particular modes of organization that are required
in biological systems. As a result, they fail to answer the objections of holist
2 Until the recent rise of mechanist accounts, most philosophical accounts of explanation viewed universal
laws as the key element in an explanation (see, for example, Hempel, 1965, for the canonical presentation
of the deductive-nomological model). This has seemed particularly problematic in the context of biology,
as biologists infrequently offer laws and, when offered, they seem to describe the phenomena more than to
provide explanations of it.
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