Reductionist inquiry, which involves decomposing a mechanism into its parts and operations, is only one of the tasks of mechanistic research.A second task (which may be undertaken largely simultaneously) is recomposing it -conceptually reassembling the parts and operations into an organized arrangement that constitutes the mechanism.Other tasks include determining how multiple operations are orchestrated in real time, and investigating how the mechanism interacts with the environment in which it is situated.Accordingly, explaining how a mechanism generates a phenomenon requires integrating research from at least two levels of organization -one involving the parts and their operations and another involving the mechanism as a whole.Sometimes additional levels are so salient that they too must be incorporated into the account.Researchers may come to recognize, for example, that the target mechanism is itself part of a larger integrated system (a higher-level mechanism) that confronts its own environment, and that operations within the target mechanism may be affected as the larger system confronts varying environmental conditions.Choosing mechanistic explanation as the preferred framework for pursuing questions of reduction both illuminates the importance of reductionistic inquiry and reveals that it must be complemented by other kinds of explanatory work.Although the modern pursuit of mechanistic explanation has a history spanning several centuries in the life sciences, it is only recently that certain philosophers focused on biology have subjected this pursuit to systematic analysis.The new mechanistic philosophy of science that has emerged from that endeavor remains unfamiliar to many other philosophers.Accordingly, we begin with a brief account of mechanistic explana-
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