Relations among fields: Mendelian, cytological and molecular mechanisms

Philosophers have proposed various kinds of relations between Mendelian genetics and molecular biology: reduction, replacement, explanatory extension. This paper argues that the two fields are best characterized as investigating different, serially integrated, hereditary mechanisms. The mechanisms operate at different times and contain different working entities. The working entities of the mechanisms of Mendelian heredity are chromosomes, whose movements serve to segregate alleles and independently assort genes in different linkage groups. The working entities of numerous mechanisms of molecular biology are larger and smaller segments of DNA plus related molecules. Discovery of molecular DNA mechanisms filled black boxes that were noted, but unilluminated, by Mendelian genetics. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.