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  1. To Err and Win a Nobel Prize: Paul Boyer, ATP Synthase and the Emergence of Bioenergetics. [REVIEW]Douglas Allchin - 2002 - Journal of the History of Biology 35 (1):149 - 172.
    Paul Boyer shared a Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work on the mechanism of ATP synthase. His earlier work, though (which contributed indirectly to his triumph), included major errors, both experimental and theoretical. Two benchmark cases offer insight into how scientists err and how they deal with error. Boyer's work also parallels and illustrates the emergence of bioenergetics in the second half of the twentieth century, rivaling achievements in evolution and molecular biology.
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  • Top-down causation without top-down causes.Carl F. Craver & William Bechtel - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (4):547-563.
    We argue that intelligible appeals to interlevel causes (top-down and bottom-up) can be understood, without remainder, as appeals to mechanistically mediated effects. Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of causal and constitutive relations, where the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. The idea of causation would have to stretch to the breaking point to accommodate interlevel causes. The notion of a mechanistically mediated effect is preferable because it can do all of the required work without appealing to mysterious interlevel causes. When interlevel (...)
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  • Thinking about mechanisms.Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden & Carl F. Craver - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (1):1-25.
    The concept of mechanism is analyzed in terms of entities and activities, organized such that they are productive of regular changes. Examples show how mechanisms work in neurobiology and molecular biology. Thinking in terms of mechanisms provides a new framework for addressing many traditional philosophical issues: causality, laws, explanation, reduction, and scientific change.
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  • From Microsomes to Ribosomes: "Strategies" of "Representation". [REVIEW]Hans-Jörg Rheinberger - 1995 - Journal of the History of Biology 28 (1):49 - 89.
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  • Mitochondrial structure and the practice of cell biology in the 1950s.Nicolas Rasmussen - 1995 - Journal of the History of Biology 28 (3):381-429.
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  • The Philosophical Origins of Mitchell's Chemiosmotic Concepts: The Personal Factor in Scientific Theory Formulation.John N. Prebble - 2001 - Journal of the History of Biology 34 (3):433 - 460.
    Mitchell's formulation of the chemiosmotic theory of oxidative phosphorylation in 1961 lacked any experimental support for its three central postulates. The path by which Mitchell reached this theory is explored. A major factor was the role of Mitchell's philosophical system conceived in his student days at Cambridge. This system appears to have become a tacit influence on his work in the sense that Polanyi understood all knowledge to be generated by an interaction between tacit and explicit knowing. Early in his (...)
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  • The Background to Otto Warburg's Conception of the "Atmungsferment".Robert E. Kohler - 1973 - Journal of the History of Biology 6 (2):171 - 192.
    In the 1930s Warburg's spare prose and disciplined respect for the facts set the style for a new generation of biochemists who had not known the conceptual revolutions of earlier years. Led by Warburg, they rejected the excesses of the colloid school and the false starts of the teens and twenties. Talk of active structure virtually disappeared as chemists began to identify enzymes, coenzymes, vitamins, and hormones. In the gradual transformation of the Atmungsferment from an ironcolloid complex to a specific (...)
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  • (1 other version)Rethinking mechanistic explanation.Stuart Glennan - 2002 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3):S342-353.
    Philosophers of science typically associate the causal-mechanical view of scientific explanation with the work of Railton and Salmon. In this paper I shall argue that the defects of this view arise from an inadequate analysis of the concept of mechanism. I contrast Salmon's account of mechanisms in terms of the causal nexus with my own account of mechanisms, in which mechanisms are viewed as complex systems. After describing these two concepts of mechanism, I show how the complex-systems approach avoids certain (...)
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  • Reconceptualizations and interfield connections: The discovery of the link between vitamins and coenzymes.William Bechtel - 1984 - Philosophy of Science 51 (2):265-292.
    The discovery that some B vitamins are constituents of respiratory coenzymes led to the development of an interfield theory of the kind discussed by Darden and Maull. In this paper it is shown that the development of a useful interfield connection was made possible by two reconceptualizations: a reconceptualization that united two then-distinct fields giving rise to the concept of vitamins as dietary substances; and another reconceptualization that united two approaches to respiratory metabolism producing the idea that coenzymes are transport (...)
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  • Explanation: a mechanist alternative.William Bechtel & Adele Abrahamsen - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2):421-441.
    Explanations in the life sciences frequently involve presenting a model of the mechanism taken to be responsible for a given phenomenon. Such explanations depart in numerous ways from nomological explanations commonly presented in philosophy of science. This paper focuses on three sorts of differences. First, scientists who develop mechanistic explanations are not limited to linguistic representations and logical inference; they frequently employ diagrams to characterize mechanisms and simulations to reason about them. Thus, the epistemic resources for presenting mechanistic explanations are (...)
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  • A Twentieth-Century Phlogiston: Constructing Error and Differentiating Domains.Douglas Allchin - 1997 - Perspectives on Science 5 (1):81-127.
    In the 1950s–60s biochemists searched intensively for a series of high-energy molecules in the cell. Although we now believe that these molecules do not exist, biochemists claimed to have isolated or identified them on at least sixteen occasions. The episode parallels the familiar eighteenth-century case of phlogiston, in illustrating how error is not simply the loss of facts but, instead, must be actively constructed. In addition, the debates surrounding each case demonstrate how revolutionary-scale disagreement is sometimes resolved by differentiating or (...)
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  • Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube.Hans-Jörg Rheinberger - 1997 - Stanford University Press.
    In this powerful work of conceptual and analytical originality, the author argues for the primacy of the material arrangements of the laboratory in the dynamics of modern molecular biology. In a post-Kuhnian move away from the hegemony of theory, he develops a new epistemology of experimentation in which research is treated as a process for producing epistemic things. A central concern of the book is the basic question of how novelty is generated in the empirical sciences. In addressing this question, (...)
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  • Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research.William Bechtel & Robert C. Richardson - 2010 - Princeton.
    An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in divergent (...)
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  • Discovering Cell Mechanisms: The Creation of Modern Cell Biology.William Bechtel - 2007 - Journal of the History of Biology 40 (1):185-187.
    Between 1940 and 1970 pioneers in the new field of cell biology discovered the operative parts of cells and their contributions to cell life. They offered mechanistic accounts that explained cellular phenomena by identifying the relevant parts of cells, the biochemical operations they performed, and the way in which these parts and operations were organised to accomplish important functions. Cell biology was a revolutionary science but in this book it also provides fuel for yet another revolution, one that focuses on (...)
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