This edited book is the outcome of a conference that was planned to take place in Lisbon at the Centro de Filosofia das Ciências (CFCUL) of the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa. It was originally organized in the usual on-site form to which we were accustomed before the start of the Covid pandemic. The conference was postponed many times, with the hope to hold it on-site, to no avail. After many postponements, to our disappointment, the conference had unfortunately to be organized in a purely online form between 14th and 15th of October in 2021. The only advantage of all this is that we saved public money.
The eventual online conference was called New Mechanism, Reduction and Emergence in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The participants were William Bechtel, Nancy Cartwright, Brigitte Falkenburg, Stuart Glennan, Robin Hendry, Alvaro Moreno and John Pemberton. Unfortunately, two of the talks (by Nancy Cartwright with John Pemberton and by Alvaro Moreno) did not result in a contribution to be published in the present volume. In the end, this book partially consists of a collection of articles based on some of the talks presented at the conference. Additionally, other contributions have been sought. It has not been easy at all to recruit other authors during the pandemic period. Our idea – already implicit in the conference title – was to seek contributions from research areas that have been somehow under-represented in the extant literature on new mechanism. We are therefore glad to have managed to enrol additional contributors, whose research encompasses several fields, including chemistry, biochemistry, developmental biology and ecology.