Life scientists increasingly rely upon abstraction-based modeling and reasoning strategies for understanding biological phenomena. We introduce the notion of constraint-based reasoning as a fruitful tool for conceptualizing some of these developments. One important role of mathematical abstractions is to impose formal constraints on a search space for possible hypotheses and thereby guide the search for plausible causal models. Formal constraints are, however, not only tools for biological explanations but can be explanatory by virtue of clarifying general dependency-relations and patterning between functions and structures. We describe such situations as constraint-based explanations and argue that these differ from mechanistic strategies in important respects. While mechanistic explanations emphasize change-relating causal features, constraint-based explanations emphasize formal dependencies and generic organizational features that are relatively independent of lower-level changes in causal details.. Our distinction between mechanistic and constraint-based explanations is pragmatically motivated by the wish to understand scientific practice. We contend that delineating the affordances and assumptions of different explanatory questions and strategies helps to clarify tensions between diverging scientific practices and the innovative potentials in their combination. Moreover, we show how constraint-based explanation integrate several features shared by otherwise different philosophical accounts of abstract explanatory strategies in biology

中文翻译：

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基于约束的搜索和解释推理：理解生物学变异和模式的策略

生命科学家越来越依赖基于抽象的建模和推理策略来理解生物现象。我们引入了基于约束的推理的概念，作为将其中一些发展概念化的富有成效的工具。数学抽象的一个重要作用是对可能的假设的搜索空间施加形式约束，从而指导对合理因果模型的搜索。然而，形式约束不仅是生物学解释的工具，而且可以通过阐明功能和结构之间的一般依赖关系和模式来进行解释。我们将这种情况描述为基于约束的解释，并认为这些在重要方面不同于机械策略。虽然机械解释强调与变化相关的因果特征，基于约束的解释强调形式依赖和一般组织特征，这些特征相对独立于因果细节的低级变化。我们区分机械解释和基于约束的解释是出于理解科学实践的愿望。我们认为，描绘不同解释性问题和策略的可供性和假设有助于澄清不同的科学实践与其结合的创新潜力之间的紧张关系。此外，我们展示了基于约束的解释如何整合生物学中抽象解释策略的不同哲学解释所共有​​的几个特征