Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects-such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes-or, as they are known in biology, "model systems." Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that have played a role comparable to that of biology's model systems, serving not only as points of reference and illustrations of general principles or values but also as sites of continued investigation and reinterpretation. The essays in this collection assess the scope and function of model objects in domains as diverse as biology, geology, and history, attending to differences between fields as well as to epistemological commonalities.
Contributors examine the role of the fruit fly Drosophila and nematode worms in biology, troops of baboons in primatology, box and digital simulations of the movement of the earth's crust in geology, and meteorological models in climatology. They analyze the intensive study of the prisoner's dilemma in game theory, ritual in anthropology, the individual case in psychoanalytic research, and Athenian democracy in political theory. The contributors illuminate the processes through which particular organisms, cases, materials, or narratives become foundational to their fields, and they examine how these foundational exemplars-from the fruit fly to Freud's Dora-shape the knowledge produced within their disciplines.
Contributors
Rachel A. Ankeny
Angela N. H. Creager
Amy Dahan Dalmedico
John Forrester
Clifford Geertz
Carlo Ginzburg
E. Jane Albert Hubbard
Elizabeth Lunbeck
Mary S. Morgan
Josiah Ober
Naomi Oreskes
Susan Sperling
Marcel Weber
M. Norton Wise

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, Elizabeth Lunbeck and M. Norton Wise, eds.