探索生物學新模型：從睡衣實驗到乳糖操縱組

Exploring a New Model in Biology: From the PaJaMa Experiment to the Lactose Operon

新機制哲學為生物學發現提供許多重要的指引策略，其中一個是機制模組組裝，在此架構下，機制模組是研究的起點。本文選取著名的睡衣實驗為硏究案例，論證生物學家在未使用特定模組的情況下，會先操作探索型實驗，將實驗現象之規律性表徵為資料模組，再由資料模組發展為資料模型，進而轉化為新穎的機制模型來表徵現象的起因機制。如此一來，機制模組不再是硏究起點，而是研究成果。透過案例硏究，不僅揭示探索實驗所得之資料模組如何被建構為新機制模型，並且顯示新機制哲學未詳釋從實驗探索新模組的發現策略。

The new mechanical philosophy has been developing many important guiding strategies for biological discovery, one of which is modular subassembly. It explicates how biologists use a given and available mechanistic schemata from the background knowledge to design and evaluate experimental data. Under this framework, the mechanistic module is the starting point of biological research, but what will biologists do if there is no available module at first? This paper presents a case study involving exploratory experimentation. This case study will show that traditional and new-mechanistic framework overly focuses on analyzing experiments as the tool serving a particular theory or mechanistic model. As a consequence, it pays less attention to the parts of exploration and experimental data used by biologists. By reconstructing their modeling process, I will present the exploratory character of the practice and argue that the biologists mostly use exploratory practice to push the modeling process. I carefully examine the process of biologists arranging, presenting and constructing new mechanism models, and explore the rationality of exploration and mechanism reasoning. This process is better because, on the one hand, it reveals that the data modules obtained from exploration experiments can be used as the composition of constructing new mechanism models; on the other hand, the complete new mechanism philosophy does not see the discovery strategies arising from experimental exploration.