In this talk I suggest that scientific investigations into biological complexity afford us the opportunity to rethink our understanding of scientific laws and of causal inference. First, I will discuss the "evolutionary contingency thesis" proposed by John Beatty and argue that rather than contingency being the grounds for ruling evolutionary truths out of the domain of laws, we should instead expand our conceptual framework to account for systems displaying a range of contingency and stability as lawful. With regard to causal inference, I will outline problems for the modularity condition proposed as part of the invariance account of causality of Jim Woodward to adequately account for inferences from knock-out experiments on genetic regulatory systems. In samenwerking met de Onderzoekseenheid "Evolution & Complexity"