Abstract

The professionalization of science is a recent phenomenon. Before the mid-1800s, investigations of the natural world were largely performed by those hobbyists who had the leisure time to do so. Things are very different today. Open one of the over twenty thousand scientific journals currently in circulation, and you would be hard pressed to decipher the technical prose, much less the methodological and conceptual strategies being employed. This is changing, however. People are not only taking greater interest in how science works, but choosing to actively participate in the process, whether this involves discovering new protein configurations , identifying and categorizing cancer cells from tissue samples , or analyzing the vocalizations of canids .Why start a review on what might seem like an academic book in contemporary philosophy of biology with a discussion of citizen science? Craver and Darden’s book, In Search of Mechanisms, is positi ..