A historical Pachinko machine, a relative of Francis Galton's Quincunx and the AAKKOZZLL, and the predecessor of the widely popular amusement in today's Japan. Click here for more info – photo by Gnsin.

The introduction to Growing Artificial Societies offers the following thought on the future of explanation:
    What constitutes an explanation of an observed social phenomenon? Perhaps one day people will interpret the question, “Can you explain it?” as asking, “Can you grow it?” Artificial society modeling allows us to “grow” social structures in silico demonstrating that certain sets of microspecifications are sufficient to generate the macrophenomena of interest … We can, of course, use statistics to test the match between the true, observed, structures and the ones we grow. But the ability to grow them … is what is new. Indeed, it holds out to prospect of a new, generative, kind of social science.
    A concluding section of the same work, entitled “Generative Social Science,” restates the point even more broadly:
    In effect, we are proposing a generative program for the social sciences and see the artificial society as its principle instrument.” (p. xi) ----
    “Many important social processes are not neatly decomposable into separate subprocesses --- economic, demographic, cultural, spatial --- whose isolated analysis can be somehow ‘aggregated’ to yield an adequate analysis of the process as whole. Yet this is exactly how academic social science is organized --- into more or less insular departments and journals of economics, demography, anthropology, and so on. While many social scientists would agree that these divisions are artificial, they would argue that there is no ‘natural methodology’ for studying these processes together, as they interact, though attempts have been made. Social scientists have taken highly aggregated mathematical models --- of entire national economies, political systems, and so on --- and have ‘connected’ them yielding ‘mega-models that have been attacked on several grounds ---. But attacks on specific models have had the effect of discrediting interdisciplinary inquiry itself, and this is most unfortunate. The line of inquiry remains crucially important. And agent-based modeling offers an alternative, and very natural technique. (p. 18)

— “The motto, in short, is: If you didn’t grow it, you didn’t explain it.” (p. 51)

Epstein, Joshua M., Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling, Princeton University Press 2006.