Concerns with the use of engineering approaches in biology have recently been raised. I examine two related challenges to biological research that I call the synchronic and diachronic underdetermination problem. The former refers to challenges associated with the inference of design principles underlying system capacities when the synchronic relations between lower-level processes and higher-level systems capacities are degenerate. The diachronic underdetermination problem regards the problem of reverse engineering a system where the non-linear relations between system capacities and lower-level mechanisms are (...) changing over time. Braun and Marom argue that recent insights to biological complexity leave the aim of reverse engineering hopeless - in principle as well as in practice. While I support their call for systemic approaches to capture the dynamic nature of living systems, I take issue with the conflation of reverse engineering with naïve reductionism. I clarify how the notion of design principles can be more broadly conceived and argue that reverse engineering is compatible with a dynamic view of organisms. It may even help to facilitate an integrated account that bridges the gap between mechanistic and systems approaches. (shrink)

As early as 1981, about 1 year before Shechtman’s discovery of an actual quasicrystal, Alan L. Mackay discussed, in a seminal paper, the first steps for the expansion of crystallography toward its modern phase. In this phase, new possibilities of structures and order, such as the structures of five-fold symmetry, for crystals have been discovered. Medieval Islamic decorators as well as Albrecht Dürer, Johannes Kepler, Roger Penrose, Mackay himself, and other pioneer crystallographers raised important contributions to the theoretical discovery of (...) crystalline possibilities long before or independently of the discovery of their actual existence. In this paper, I discuss further the philosophical significance of Mackay’s theoretical discovery and his contribution to the expansion of pure geometrical crystallography, biological crystallography, and generalized crystallography. (shrink)