Abstract
The appeal to mechanisms in scientific explanation is commonplace in contemporary philosophy of science. In short, mechanists argue that an explanation of a phenomenon consists of citing the mechanism that brings the phenomenon about. In this paper, we present an argument that challenges the universality of mechanistic explanation: in explanations of the contemporary features of the eukaryotic cell, biologists appeal to its symbiogenetic origin and therefore the notion of symbiogenesis plays the main explanatory role. We defend the notion that symbiogenesis is non-mechanistic in nature and that any attempt to explain some of the contemporary features of the eukaryotic cell mechanistically turns out to be at least insufficient and sometimes fails to address the question that is asked. Finally, we suggest that symbiogenesis is better understood as a pragmatic scientific law and present an alternative non-mechanistic model of scientific explanation. In the model we present, the use of scientific laws is supposed to be a minimal requirement of all scientific explanations, since the purpose of a scientific explanation is to make phenomena expectable. Therefore, this model would help to understand biologists’ appeal to the notion of symbiosis and thus is shown to be better, for the case under examination, than the mechanistic alternative.
This work is fully collaborative; the authors are listed alphabetically.
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- 1.
This point is however controversial, as some people have also defended the idea that other processes such as a phagocytosis might also be considered as the starting point of eukaryocity (e.g. Cavalier-Smith 1989). However, that would not remove the need to explain the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts in a satisfactory manner, which would lead to the same kind of questions that we mention later. For the purposes of this paper and for simplicity, we will follow Martin’s proposal that equates the origin of eukaryotes with the origin of mitochondria. Thanks to Thomas Bonnin for pointing this out to us.
- 2.
Symbiogenesis is the process of generation of a new biological structure (organ, metabolic pathway, etc.) as a consequence of a long-term symbiotic association. In the case of the eukaryotic cell, symbiogenesis refers to the origin of a complete new biological domain as a consequence of symbiosis. Symbiotic organisms can interact in two different ways: endosymbiotically, if one organism lives within the cell(s) of the other, and ectosymbiotically, when one organism lives on the surface of the cell(s) of the other, but not within them (Archibald 2014). Symbiogenesis is thus a process, whereas endosymbiosis is a state. This distinction has to be kept in mind for the rest of the paper. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging us to clarify this point.
- 3.
Leuridan (2010) argues that for every mechanism we can find an underlying regularity. His conclusion is that the explanatory character of mechanisms lies precisely in these hidden regularities, which actually is conceding too much to the nomological expectability models mechanists were criticizing in the first place.
- 4.
In fact, the notions of entities and activities come from a modification of the previous description of a mechanism in terms of parts and operations/interactions. Bechtel and Glennan still define mechanisms by appealing to the notions of parts and operations/interactions. The motives for their choice can be found in Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2005, fn. 5). Machamer et al. (2000, §3) introduced the new notions of entities and activities, mainly for ontological reasons. We take this not to be a substantive distinction for the purposes of this paper.
- 5.
Earlier in this section we argued, as part of the response to question 1, that it was quite hard to conceive of symbiosis as a factor. We still believe this, for the reasons discussed there, but we are going to assume here that it might serve as one, just for the sake of the argument.
- 6.
In fact it would not even be a mechanism in the sense of “expanded mechanism” as defended by Roe and Baumgaertner (2016), since the problem here is not related to incorporating “pieces” of the environment, as they suggest: the problem is related to the fact that what plays the explanatory role is a regularity.
- 7.
One might still wonder about the exact relationship between mechanisms and regularities in certain explanatory contexts. It is not the aim of this paper to elucidate the nature of that relationship. Nonetheless, some mechanist philosophers have already recognized the use of non-accidental regularities in mechanistic explanations (e.g. Craver and Kaiser 2013; Glennan 1996) and we believe that, in most cases of mechanistic explanation, what does the real explanatory work is the presence of background non-accidental regularities. We plan to develop this line of thought further in a future paper.
- 8.
Of course, the defender of mechanistic explanation might still argue that the appeal to symbiogenesis is not, after all, explanatory. A similar strategy has been pursued by Craver (2008) concerning the explanatory character of the Hodgin-Huxley model of action potential in neurons. However, we believe that pursuing that strategy would violate some basic commitments common to biologists concerning explanation.
- 9.
See also Brandon (1997) for more about biological generalizations having a limited range of nomic necessity and explanatory power.
- 10.
Mitchel also includes other parameters: ontological ones (strength, plus the aforementioned stability) and representational ones (degree of abstraction, simplicity and cognitive manageability), which we take not to be relevant for our purposes in this paper. See Mitchell (2003, chapter 5) for more details.
- 11.
What follows is mainly based on the analysis we already presented in Deulofeu and Suárez (2015).
- 12.
As we said before, the notion of law that we use is Mitchell’s idea of pragmatic law.
- 13.
This reconstruction is merely informal and, due to particular complexities of biological theory, it cannot be made as precise as it could be in the case of classical mechanics. In any case, it has all the elements that are supposed to provide a general idea concerning embedding.
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Acknowledgments
Different versions of this paper were presented at the VIII Meeting of the Spanish Society for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (University of Barcelona, 2015) and the III Conference of the German Society for the Philosophy of Science (University of Düsseldorf, 2016). We would like to thank all the participants for their helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Thomas Bonnin, Mark Canciani, José Díez, John Dupré, Çağlar Karaca, Adrian Stencel and an anonymous referee, who read previous versions of this paper and made helpful comments and suggestions. Finally, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2016-767999-P) and the Fundación Bancaria la Caixa are formally acknowledged for their economic support.
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Deulofeu, R., Suárez, J. (2018). When Mechanisms Are Not Enough: The Origin of Eukaryotes and Scientific Explanation. In: Christian, A., Hommen, D., Retzlaff, N., Schurz, G. (eds) Philosophy of Science. European Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72577-2_6
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