title: Integration of approaches in David Wake's model-taxon research platform for evolutionary morphology.
abstract: What gets integrated in integrative scientific practices has been a topic of much discussion. Traditional views focus on theories and explanations, with ideas of reduction and unification dominating the conversation. More recent ideas focus on disciplines, fields, or specialties; models, mechanisms, or methods; phenomena, problems. How integration works looks different on each of these views since the objects of integration are ontologically and epistemically various: statements, boundary conditions, practices, protocols, methods, variables, parameters, domains, laboratories, and questions all have their own structures, functions and logics. I focus on one particular kind of scientific practice, integration of "approaches" in the context of a research system operating on a special kind of "platform." Rather than trace a network of interactions among people, practices, and theoretical entities to be integrated, in this essay I focus on the work of a single investigator, David Wake. I describe Wake's practice of integrative evolutionary biology and how his integration of approaches among biological specialties worked in tandem with his development of the salamanders as a model taxon, which he used as a platform to solve, re-work and update problems that would not have been solved so well by non-integrative approaches. The larger goal of the project to which this paper contributes is a counter-narrative to the story of 20th century life sciences as the rise and march of the model organisms and decline of natural history.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, United States. Electronic address: jrgriesemer@ucdavis.edu.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Griesemer
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D001695:Biology / Q000266:history*; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D023421:Models, Animal; D014562:Caudata / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: David B. Wake; Evolutionary morphology; Integration; Model taxon; Research system