Abstract
The emphasis on the organization of entities and their activities and interactions has been labeled one of the most distinct contributions of mechanistic philosophy. In this paper I discuss the manner in which the organization of entities and their activities and interactions participates in bringing about phenomena. I present a well-known example from molecular biology—the functioning of the genetic switch in phage lambda—and discuss Marco J. Nathan’s notion of causation by concentration. Nathan introduces causation by concentration to account for the irreducible causal role that the concentration ratio between two kinds of proteins possesses in the genetic switch mechanism in phage lambda. I discuss what the irreducibility of this causal role amounts to and provide a mechanistic interpretation of Nathan’s causation by concentration; that is, I explain this irreducible causal role as one organizational feature of this mechanism. The paper concludes that biological mechanisms need a causal pluralist framework [similar to Glennan’s account in (2009), (2010) and (2017) but slightly modified] where organizational features such as the concentration ratio have a causally relevant role, yet all the causally productive relations occur at the level of entities or individuals.
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Notes
For a detailed description, see Ptashne (2004).
The gene names are italicized while their corresponding protein names are not.
See Nathan (2014) pp. 199–200, for the complete argument against Salmon/Dowe’s process theory, due to its inability to account for the stability of the genetic switch. The ˝snapshot˝ argument applies equally to the MDC approach.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under the projects IP-2013-11-5343 and IP-2018-01-3378.
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Anić, Z. The Metaphysics of Causation in Biological Mechanisms: A Case of the Genetic Switch in Lambda Phage. Acta Biotheor 69, 435–448 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-020-09395-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-020-09395-8