The Gradational Sense of Mechanisms
The Gradational Sense of Mechanisms

Summary/Abstract: The famous Dobzhansky’s (1973) dictum, according to which “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”, is supposed to involve all the biological sciences. But, what about biological mechanisms, such as, most notably in the philosophical literature, the mechanism of protein synthesis? If the dictum applies here as well, how should we correctly account for its evolutionary-historical character? Recently, Garson (2023) has argued that whether or not something is a biological mechanism partly depends on its history. In this paper, I examine how the mechanism of protein synthesis can evolve from accidental and unstructured causal processes occurring in the genome (see Van Oss and Carvunis 2019). Such historical analysis allows me to outline some general features of an important type of biological mechanism. It shows that such features can be discerned without invoking the mechanism’s evolutionary history in the way argued by Garson’s current account, and that the sense of mechanism in question is not typical for biology.

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