  Ever since the advent of molecular biology in the 1970s, mechanical models
have become the dogma in the field, where a "true" understanding of any subject
is equated to a mechanistic description. This has been to the detriment of the
biomedical sciences, where, barring some exceptions, notable new feats of
understanding have arguably not been achieved in normal and disease biology,
including neurodegenerative disease and cancer pathobiology. I argue for a
"mechanism-plus-X" paradigm, where mainstay elements of mechanistic models such
as hierarchy and correlation are combined with nomological principles such as
general operative rules and generative principles. Depending on the question at
hand and the nature of the inquiry, X could range from proven physical laws to
speculative biological generalizations, such as the notional principle of
cellular synchrony. I argue that the "mechanism-plus-X" approach should
ultimately aim to move biological inquiries out of the deadlock of
oft-encountered mechanistic pitfalls and reposition biology to its former
capacity of illuminating fundamental truths about the world.
