Reasoning Strategies in Molecular Biology: Abstractions, Scans and Anomalies

Abstract

In the spring of 1994, Lindley Darden spent five months as a visitor in Joshua Lederberg's Laboratory for Molecular Genetics and Informatics (MGI) at Rockefeller University. Michael Cook is a Research Associate in the MGI Lab. This paper discusses reasoning strategies at use in that lab. In Part I, Lindley Darden recounts her experiences in the lab and discusses reasoning strategies that she observed in use there. In Part II, Michael Cook presents a technique of methodical hypothesis generation in the light of an anomaly for a model. The reasoning strategies to be discussed in this paper are reasoning in hypothesis formation, reasoning in experimental design, and reasoning to generate hypotheses in the light of an anomaly. More specifically, the reasoning strategies may be characterized as (1) abstraction-instantiation (Darden, 1987; 1991; Darden and Cain, 1989), (2) the systematic scan (Lederberg, 1965), and (3) modular anomaly resolution (Darden, 1991; 1992; forthcoming).

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