In search of mechanisms : discoveries across the life sciences / Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden.

  • Craver, Carl F.
Date:
2013
  • Books

About this work

Description

With In Search of Mechanisms, Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden offer both a descriptive and an instructional account of how biologists discover mechanisms. Drawing on examples from across the life sciences and through the centuries, Craver and Darden compile an impressive toolbox of strategies that biologists have used and will use again to reveal the mechanisms that produce, underlie, or maintain the phenomena characteristic of living things. They discuss the questions that figure in the search for mechanisms, characterizing the experimental, observational, and conceptual considerations used to answer them, all the while providing examples from the history of biology to highlight the kinds of evidence and reasoning strategies employed to assess mechanisms. At a deeper level, Craver and Darden pose a systematic view of what biology is, of how biology makes progress, of how biological discoveries are and might be made, and of why knowledge of biological mechanisms is important for the future of the human species. -- Publisher website.

Publication/Creation

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Physical description

xxii, 228 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-218) and index.

Contents

Introduction : discovering mechanisms -- Biological mechanisms -- Representing biological mechanisms -- Characterizing the phenomenon -- Strategies for mechanism schema construction -- Virtues and vices of mechanism schemas -- Constraints on mechanism schemas -- Experiments and the search for mechanisms -- Strategies for revising mechanism schemas -- Interfield and interlevel integration -- The pragmatic value of knowing how something works.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    AO.AM
    Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780226039657
  • 022603965X
  • 9780226039794
  • 022603979X