University of Kyoto, Graduate School of Letters, Department of Philosophy, Kyoto, Japan.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2010;32(1):43-62.
Philosophical analyses of biology have recently been dominated by a mechanistic perspective. Examples taken from different domains in the life sciences, from molecular biology to physiology, seem to support mechanistic accounts. In this paper, I examine the emerging field of systems biology and argue that some of its approaches do not fit the mechanistic framework. I present an example of what can be called design explanation and show how it differs from classical mechanistic explanations. First, it is a non-causal kind of explanation that does not show how a function is produced by a mechanism but illustrates how a system's function determines its structure. Second, it points to general design principles that do not depend much on evolutionary contingency. Thus, systems biology has theoretical ambitions, but I argue that its modeling strategy can help it to avoid classical problems encountered by theoretical efforts in biology in the past, by giving it a strong empirical grounding.
生物学的哲学分析最近一直受到机械论观点的主导。从分子生物学到生理学等不同生命科学领域中选取的例子似乎支持机械论解释。在本文中，我考察了系统生物学这一新兴领域，并认为其某些方法不符合机械论框架。我提出了一个可以被称为设计解释的例子，并展示了它与经典机械论解释的不同之处。首先，它是非因果性的解释，它没有说明功能是如何由机制产生的，而是说明了系统的功能如何决定其结构。其次，它指向了一般的设计原则，这些原则不太依赖于进化的偶然性。因此，系统生物学具有理论野心，但我认为，它的建模策略可以帮助它避免过去生物学理论研究中遇到的经典问题，因为它具有强大的经验基础。
