The recent literature on causation has seen the introduction of several distinctions within causation, which are thought to be important for understanding the widespread scientific practice of focusing causal explanations on a subset of the factors that are causally relevant for a phenomenon. Concepts used to draw such distinctions include, among others, stability, specificity, proportionality, or actual-difference making. In this contribution, I propose a new distinction that picks out an explanatorily salient class of causes in biological systems. Some select causes in complex biological systems, I argue, have the property of enabling coherent causal control of these systems. Examples of such control variables include hormones and other signaling molecules, e.g., TOR (target of rapamycin), morphogens or the products of homeotic selector genes in embryonic pattern formation. I propose an analysis of this notion based on concepts borrowed from causal graph theory.

最近关于因果关系的文献已经看到在因果关系中引入了几个区别，这被认为对于理解将因果解释集中在与现象因果相关的因素子集上的广泛科学实践很重要。用于划定此类区别的概念包括稳定性、特异性、比例性或实际差异制造等。在这篇文章中，我提出了一个新的区别，它在生物系统中挑选出一类具有解释意义的显着原因。我认为，复杂生物系统中的某些特定原因具有实现连贯因果控制的特性这些系统。这种控制变量的例子包括激素和其他信号分子，例如 TOR（雷帕霉素的靶标）、形态发生素或胚胎模式形成中同源异型选择基因的产物。我建议根据从因果图论中借用的概念对这个概念进行分析。