This collection on case-based reasoning in the natural- and human sciences showcases some ways that scholars think with small instances while en route, or not, to more general laws.

Introduction / Angela N.H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and M. Norton Wise 1
Part 1: Biology
Redesigning the Fruit Fly: The Molecularization of Drosophila / Marcel Weber 23
Wormy Logic: Model Organisms as Case-Based Reasoning / Rachel A. Ankeny 46
Model Organisms as Powerful Tools for Biomedical Research / E. Jane Albert Hubbard 59
The Troop Trope: Baboon Behavior as a Model System in the Postwar Period / Susan Sperling 73
Part 2: Simulations
From Scaling to Simulation: Changing Meanings and Ambitions of Models in Geology / Naomi Oreskes 93
Models and Simulations in Climate Change: Historical, Epistemological, Anthropological, and Political Aspects / Amy Dahan Dalmedico 125
The Curios Case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Model Situation? Exemplary Narrative? / Mary S. Morgan
Part 3: Human Sciences
The Psychoanalytic Case: Voyeurism, Ethics, and Epistemology in Robert Stoller’s Sexual Excitement / John Forrester 189
“To Exist Is to Have Confidence in One’s Way of Being”: Rituals as Model Systems / Clifford Geertz 212
Democratic Athens as an Experimental System: History and the Project of Political Theory / Josiah Ober 225
Latitude, Slaves, and the Bible: An Experiment in Microhistory / Carlo Ginzburg 243
Afterword: Reflections on Exemplary Narratives, Cases, and Model Organisms / Mary S. Morgan 264
Contributors 275
Index 279

Angela N. H. Creager is Professor of History at Princeton University. She is the author of The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930–1965.

Elizabeth Lunbeck is the Nelson Tyrone Jr. Professor of American History at Vanderbilt University. Her books include The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America.

M. Norton Wise is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the editor of Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science, also published by Duke University Press.