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For much of the twentieth century scientists sought to explain objects and processes by reducing them to their components--nuclei into protons and neutrons, proteins into amino acids, and so on--but over the past forty years there has been a marked turn toward explaining phenomena by building them up rather than breaking them down. This collection reflects on the history and significance of this turn toward "growing explanations" from the bottom up. The essays show how this strategy--based on a widespread appreciation for complexity even in apparently simple processes and on the capacity of...

An account of the rise of physical sciences in Berlin in the nineteenth century, and the role played by the larger cultural flowering occurring at the time-the ways that ideas cross-fertilized.

Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects--such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes--or, as they are known in biology, "model systems." Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that have played a role...

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some understanding of how elementary objects get built up, or "grown up," into complex, objects whose