Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-22dnz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T21:26:13.034Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Models Of and Models For: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Evelyn Fox Keller
Evelyn Fox Keller*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, E51–263, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Two decades of critique have sensitized historians and philosophers of science to the inadequacies of conventional dichotomies between theory and practice, thereby prompting the search for new ways of writing about science that are less beholden than the old ways to the epistemological mores of theoretical physics, and more faithful to the actual practices not only of physics but of all the natural sciences. The need for alternative descriptions seems particularly urgent if one is to understand the place of theory (and, in parallel, the role of modeling) in contemporary molecular biology, a science where, until now, no division between theory and experiment has obtained, and where distinctions between representing and intervening, and more generally, between basic and applied science, are daily becoming more blurred.

Indeed, the very division between theory and experiment threatens to slight the extensive and sophisticated theoretical analyses (and even modeling) on which experimental work in contemporary molecular biology so often depends. My aim in this paper is to find a way of talking about theoretical practices in biology that is directly rooted in the mix of conceptual and material work that biologists do. As an example of such theoretical practices, I choose for the focus of my analysis the development of a model for gene regulation out of the experimental work of Eric Davidson and his colleagues at Cal Tech.

Type
Metaphilosophy and the History of the Philosophy of Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue S3: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers Sep., 2000 , 2000 , pp. S72 - S86
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Eric Davidson, Margaret Morrison, and Jed Buchwald for their helpful comments.

References

Buchwald, Jed Z. (ed.) (1995), Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cartwright, Nancy (1998), “Models”, in Morgan and Morrison 1998, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Cartwright, Nancy, Shomar, Towfic, and Suárez, Maricio (1995), “The Tool Box of Science”, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 44: 137–149.Google Scholar
Collingwood, R. C. (1940), “Causation in Practical Natural Science”, in R. C. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 296–312.Google Scholar
Gannett, Lisa (1998), “Genetic Variation: Difference, Deviation, or Deviance?”, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Western Ontario.Google Scholar
Gannett, Lisa. (1999), “What's in a Cause?: The Pragmatic Dimensions of Genetic Explanations”, Biology and Philosophy, in press.10.1023/A:1006583215835CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hesse, Mary (1980), “The Explanatory Function of Metaphor”, in Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 111–124.Google Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox (1992), “Critical Silences in Scientific Discourse: Problems of Form and Re-Form”, in Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science. New York: Routledge Press, 73–92.Google Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1998), “Making Sense of Life: Explanation in Developmental Biology”, in J. Maienschein and R. Creath (eds.), Biology and Epistemology, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Kirchhamer, C. V., Yuh, C. H., and Davidson, E. H. (1996), “Modular Cis-regulatory Organization of Developmentally Expressed Genes: Two Genes Transcribed Territorially in the Sea Urchin Embryo, and Additional Examples”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 93: 9322–9328.10.1073/pnas.93.18.9322CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Knight, Thomas F. Jr. and Sussman, Gerald Jay (1998), “Cellular Gate Technology”, in Calude, Cristian, Casti, J. L., and Dinneen, M. J. (eds.), Unconventional Models of Computation. New York: Springer, 257–272.Google Scholar
Krieger, Martin H. (1992), Doing Physics: How Physicists Take Hold of the World. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Monod, Jacques and Jacob, Francois (1961), “General Conclusions: Teleonomic Mechanisms in Cellular Metabolism, Growth, and Differentiation”, Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 26: 389–401.10.1101/SQB.1961.026.01.048CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Mary and Morrison, Margaret C. (eds.), (1998), Models as Mediators. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Morrison, Margaret C. (1998a), “Modelling Nature: Between Physics and the Physical World”, Philosophia Naturalis 35: 65–85.Google Scholar
Morrison, Margaret C. (1998b), “Models as Autonomous Agents”, in Morgan and Morrison 1998, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Reddy, Michael J. (1993), “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in our Language about Language”, in Andrew Ortony, Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 164–201.10.1017/CBO9781139173865.012CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinberg, Robert (1985), “The Molecules of Life”, Scientific American 253(4): 48–57.10.1038/scientificamerican1085-48CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilmut, I., Schnieke, A. E., McWhir, J., Kind, A. J., and Campbell, K. H. S. (1997), “Viable Offspring Derived from Fetal and Adult Mammalian Cells”, Nature 385: 810–813.10.1038/385810a0CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Woodward, James (1998), A Theory of Explanation, in preparation.Google Scholar
Wray, Gregory A. (1998), “Promoter Logic”, Science 279: 1871–1872.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yuh, Chiou-Hwa, Bolouri, H., and Davidson, E. H. (1998), “Genomic Cis-Regulatory Logic: Experimental and Computational Analysis of a Sea Urchin Gene”, Science 279: 1896–1902.10.1126/science.279.5358.1896CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yuh, Chiou-Hwa and Davidson, E. H. (1996), “Modular Cis-Regulatory Organization of Endo16”, Development 122: 1069.10.1242/dev.122.4.1069CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yuh, Chiou-Hwa, Moore, J. G., and Davidson, E. H. (1996), “Quantitative Functional Interrelations within the Cis-Regulatory System of the S. purpuratus Endoló Gene”, Development 122: 4045–56.10.1242/dev.122.12.4045CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yuh, Chiou-Hwa, Ransick, A., Martinez, P., Britten, R. J., and Davidson, E. H. (1994), “Complexity and Organization of DNA-Protein Interactions in the 5'-Regulatory Region of an Endoderm-Specific Marker Gene in the Sea Urchin Embryo”, Mechanisms of Development 47: 165–186.10.1016/0925-4773(94)90088-4CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed