Mechanists Must be Holists Too! Perspectives from Circadian Biology

Abstract

The pursuit of mechanistic explanations in biology has produced a great deal of knowledge about the parts, operations, and organization of mechanisms taken to be responsible for biological phenomena. Holist critics have often raised important criticisms of proposed mechanistic explanations, but until recently holists have not had alternative research strategies through which to advance explanations. This paper argues both that the results of mechanistic strategies has forced mechanists to confront ways in which whole systems affect their components and that new representational and modeling strategies are providing tools for understanding these effects of whole systems upon components. Drawing from research on the mechanism responsible for circadian rhythms in mammals, I develop two examples in which mechanistic analysis is being integrated into a more holist perspective: research revealing intercellular integration of circadian mechanisms with those involved in cell metabolism and research revealing that stable rhythms are dependent on how individual cells in the suprachiasmatic nucleus synchronize with each other to generate regular rhythms. Tools such as network diagramming and computational modeling are providing means to integrate mechanistic models into accounts of whole systems.

Mechanistic decomposition and reduction in complex, context-sensitive systems

“…But this is not obviously the case. Bechtel (2016) has asserted that “reductionists must be holists too!,” arguing that any worthwhile explanation of a system at a lower level must make reference to systemic properties and organization – otherwise, one would never know which kinds of organization must be implemented at the lower level. Moreover, it has always been a part of Bechtel’s program that mechanistic explanations must go hand-in-hand with dynamical explanations in order to account for phenomena ( Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 2010 ).…”

Getting over Atomism: Functional Decomposition in Complex Neural Systems

“…Mechanists have argued that mechanism identity is explanandum relative (Craver [2007]), that mechanism description should be sensitive to explanatory context (Craver [2001]), and for a variety of ways in which dynamical and network-based models of systems can interact productively with mechanistic research. Abrahamsen ([2009], [2010]; Bechtel, [2016]) in particular have argued that understanding dynamics, 'recomposing' the mechanism, and situating the mechanism in the environment (Roe and Baumgartner [2017]) are all important for understanding how a mechanism produces a phenomenon. 10 In discussion of reductionism, Wimsatt ([2006]) has suggested that interlevel correspondences within mechanisms will be heavily context-dependent.…”

Understanding the genetics of neuropsychiatric disorders: the potential role of genomic regulatory blocks

“…This is primarily due to the difficulty of identifying the biological effect of variants identified as significantly associated with the disorder. More philosophically, it is becoming increasingly recognised that considering interactions across the whole system is required to understand mechanisms in biology [1], and this may be particularly the case for brain disorders [2]. In the rest of the article we will refer to GWAS because they are the focus of much genetic research in neuropsychiatric disorders at the moment, but the same issues apply to other genetic association studies.…”