Systems biology and the mechanistic framework

Philosophical analyses of biology have recently been dominated by a mechanistic perspective. Examples taken from different domains in the life sciences, from molecular biology to physiology, seem to support mechanistic accounts. In this paper, I examine the emerging field of systems biology and argue that some of its approaches do not fit the mechanistic framework. I present an example of what can be called design explanation and show how it differs from classical mechanistic explanations. First, it is a non-causal kind of explanation that does not show how a function is produced by a mechanism but illustrates how a system's function determines its structure. Second, it points to general design principles that do not depend much on evolutionary contingency. Thus, systems biology has theoretical ambitions, but I argue that its modeling strategy can help it to avoid classical problems encountered by theoretical efforts in biology in the past, by giving it a strong empirical grounding.