1 Matching Annotations
- Dec 2017
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‘Thingness’ has a very real impact on scientific work by motivating the search for mechanisms. A mechanism is a precisely arranged set of stable things whose interactions generate a phenomenon of interest. Scientists often see uncovering mechanisms as the gold standard of scientific insight. This approach certainly has its benefits: not everything can be examined at the same time, and science depends on careful attention to well-defined parts of the whole.
However, mechanistic explanations can be successful only under certain conditions. First, the constituent bits must be stable over the relevant timescales. So, for instance, most enzymes will be more or less fixed over the course of the cellular process they’re involved with. But enzymes have life cycles too, stretching from their creation to their decay, or proteolysis – which is itself catalysed by further proteins.
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