Replacing Physics Laws With Biological Mechanisms

Luka Jagor | The Deep Dive Podcast · Feb 12, 2026 · 4m

William Bechtel, a leading philosopher at UC San Diego, champions the mechanistic approach to scientific explanation. He argues that phenomena in biology and the life sciences are best understood by identifying underlying mechanisms—systems of component parts performing organized operations to produce the observed behavior—rather than deducing them from universal laws, as in the traditional deductive-nomological (D-N) model. This perspective aligns closely with how practicing biologists actually work: decomposing complex processes, modeling interactions (often with diagrams and simulations)…