APS Box — Mechanisms Require Organisational Context

APS fully accepts the reality and importance of biological mechanisms.

Mechanisms are causally efficacious organised processes that generate reliable state changes. They are indispensable to biological explanation.

However, mechanisms are biologically intelligible only within the organisational contexts in which they operate.

A mechanism explains how a process occurs, but organisation explains why that process matters for viability, persistence and regulation.

Mechanisms therefore do not replace organisation. They realise it.

APS rejects both mechanistic reductionism and anti-mechanistic holism. Biological explanation requires understanding how mechanisms operate within continuity-preserving organisation across multiple scales.