Is the philosophy of mechanism philosophy enough?

Recognition of the widespread use of the word 'mechanism' in bio-molecular research has resulted in the concept of 'mechanism' becoming a focal point for a highly visible group of philosophers of biology. Rather, however, than grasping and elucidating the situated aims and practices of biologists themselves, the philosophical investigation of the contemporary meaning of mechanism in biology has been commandeered by the needs of 'hard naturalists' to replace the old deductive-nomological model of the 'received view' with a new normative-explanatory gold-standard. It is argued that rather than an orientation toward an increasingly precise characterization of mechanisms as being an ultimate end in biological research, in actual biological practice 'mechanism' means different things in different contexts, pragmatically draws on our embodied know-how in the use of machines and is not, nor should be, an ultimate end of biological research. Further, it is argued, that classic work on low-level mechanisms became taken up qualitatively as parts of the scaffolding for investigating higher level regulatory processes and that in so doing, and in light of new findings such as that of the regulatory significance of 'pleiomorphic ensembles' and 'intrinsically unstructured proteins' the explanatory limits of the mechanism image have already come into view.

The question of questions: what is a gene? Comments on Rolston and Griffiths & Stotz.

If the question "What is a gene?'' proves to be worth asking it must be able to elicit an answer which both recognizes and address the reasons why the concept of the gene ever seemed to be something worth getting excited about in the first place as well analyzing and evaluating the latest develops in the molecular biology of DNA. Each of the preceding papers fails to do one of these and suffers the consequences. Where Rolston responds to the apparent failure of molecular biology to make good on the desideratum of the classical gene by veering off into fanciful talk about "cybernetic genes,'' Griffiths and Stotz lose themselves in the molecular fine print and forget to ask themselves why "genes'' should be of any special interest anyway.

From representational preformationism to the epigenesis of openness to the world? Reflections on a new vision of the organism.

The problem of how to reconcile the apparent "purposiveness" of the living organism with nonteleological, mechanist modes of explanation was given a certain form through most of the 20th century by a relatively decontextualized understanding of the gene as the heritable determinant of phenotypic traits. As instrumentally preformationist presuppositions about genes give way to the burgeoning elucidation of cell and molecular mechanisms of epigenesis, basic questions about the nature of complex living systems and their evolutionary origins once again come into consideration. Some suggestions are offered for a vision of the genetically recontextualized organism.