Machamer, Darden, and Craver have argued that biological knowledge is typically organized around

mechanisms. Typical mechanistic explanations in experimental biology then show how such entities
and activities interact to produce regular changes from some setup to some termination conditions
in a biological system.
Kenneth Schaffner thinks that the view that biological explanations are accomplished by descriptions
of mechanisms is correct as a first approximation (1993, 287). However, he has argued that
something else is needed to make such explanations complete, namely laws of working.
It is crucial for the notion of biological mechanisms that these mechanisms exhibit some regularity in
their behavior. Furthermore, the kind of regularities exhibited by mechanisms and their constituent
entities are not contingent regularities; they display nomic necessity. The best indication of nomic
necessity is thought to be the fact that these regularities support counterfactuals. These
considerations suggest that the behavior of biological mechanisms and their constituent entities is
lawful. This raises the question of what the source is for this kind of lawful behavior. Are the
regularities exhibited by biological mechanisms due to some laws of nature? Or can the same
regularities be explicated without laws?
The next question to be addressed in relation to laws of nature is whether the laws that feature in
typical explanations in experimental biology are just physicochemical laws?
John Beatty (1995) has argued that all distinctly biological generalizations describe contingent
outcomes of evolution and thus fail to be necessary.
Kenneth Waters (1998) counters the Evolutionary Contingency Thesis by drawing a distinction
between biological generalizations that describe the distribution of some trait among groups of
organisms and generalizations that describe dispositions or causal regularities.
To this move, Beatty (1995, 6062) responds as follows. He first accepts Waterss point that
biological regularities such as Mendels laws could, at least in principle, be rendered lawlike (i.e.,
noncontingent) by specifying a natural kind (see below) in terms of the underlying physiological
mechanisms, although he considers this to be difficult. But he then goes on to claim that such a
reformulation will always destroy the laws distinctively biological character; in other words, the laws
transmogrify into physicochemical ones.
Thus, according to Beatty, there is some kind of necessary tradeoff between a regularitys
lawlikeness and its distinctively biological character: *T+he closer ones generalizations * . . . + come
to describing sequences of chemical reactions, the more certain one can be that they are laws,
because one can be more certain that no evolutionary outcomes can contradict them. But at the
same time, the generalizations will become less and less distinctively biological (Beatty 1995, 62).
According to Beatty, as soon as one tries to specify the shared internal makeup of these
structures in order to pick out their causal dispositions, one ends up with molecules, and thus
leaves the distinctively biological realm.
Natural kinds are thought to be classes of things (or processes, or events) that are clearly distinct
from other things by sharing an internal makeup and, therefore, a set of causal dispositions. Now, it
seems to be an implicit assumption of Beattys that all natural kinds of the sort that support genuine
laws of nature must be physical or chemical natural kinds.
But this means that if a lawis genuinely biological, then it must have a different status from physical
and chemical laws, which are about natural kinds that are individuated by immutable causal
dispositions.
What I want to claim here is that in large parts of modern experimental biology, Beattys thesis is
correct. That is, all the genuine laws of nature that feature in experimental biology are
physicochemical laws. If they describe the behavior of some natural kind of system, then the natural
kind in question is a physicochemical kind, for example, a molecular species. If they do not range
over such natural kinds, then biological generalizations describe contingent outcomes of evolution
and are, therefore, not genuine laws of nature.
Physics and chemistry are in the business of describing laws of nature. Reductionistic experimental
biology, by contrast, is in the business of applying such laws to explaining biological phenomena; it
does not look for any generic biological laws.
This reductionistic practice makes sense if viewed from a metaphysical standpoint such as Elliss,
according to which genuine laws and natural kinds, that is, laws about the fixed causal powers of
natural kinds of things, are always physical or chemical (e.g., molecular structures).
functional explanation. For this explanatory mode seems to be at loggerheads with my thesis that
the explanatory approach of some parts of experimental biology consists in applying physicochemical
laws to biological systems, since functional explanation is alien to the physical sciences.
physicochemical explanations of a special kind of system. The problem is that such explanations
do not usually support functional attributions.