Unifying biology under the search for mechanisms

Abstract

In Search Of Mechanisms is a book about the methodology of biology. It is a work by Carl Craver and Lindley Darden, both of whom are well-known individually for their advocacy of mechanistic explanation—in the neurosciences (Craver) and in the fields of genetics, cytology and molecular biology (Darden). Here, the two join forces to give a unified model of biological explanation, not limited to a particular area of biological enquiry, as rooted in the search for mechanisms. The objectives of the book are threefold. First, it sets out to describe what biologists do. This first objective can be described as the goal of making biology more comprehensible. If biology involves the search for mechanisms, then one cannot understand the history of biology and its current practice without understanding mechanisms. Secondly, the book seeks to give a proscriptive account of explanation and the process of explaining some phenomena. This second objective relates to an interest in contributing to the methodology of biological inquiry. If mechanisms are responsible for the myriad of phenomena of interest in the life sciences, then working biologists might benefit from a ‘guidebook’ to reasoning strategies that most efficiently and accurately represent mechanisms. Lastly, it offers a picture of the unity of the biological sciences—one in which the search for mechanisms provides the basis for inter-field collaboration in biology. While Craver and Darden (henceforth ‘CD’) write that the search for mechanisms is ‘‘one of the grand achievements in the history of science’’ (p. 3), they nevertheless advance mechanistic explanation as the new ‘standard model’ of explanation specifically in the field of biology. They leave the question of whether the mechanistic model will be useful in other sciences ‘‘open’’ (p. 198).