Free What is Life?:How chemistry becomes biology by Addy Pross

earlier that the inductive method—the seeking of generalizations, the recognition of patterns—is at the core of all scientific understanding. However, a particular kind of inductive thinking has proven to be of special value, the one termed
reduction.
The concept of reduction can itself be elaborated upon and split upinto a number of subgroups, something philosophers of science have been exploring in recent years, but these more detailed ideas need not concern us here. The essence of the reductionist approach is simply: ‘the whole can be understood in terms of the interaction of its constituent parts’. For example, if you want to understand how a clock works then break it up into its component parts—wheels, cogs, springs, etc., and see how these work together to create the functional entity. Reductionist thinking of one kind or other has been instrumental in advancing scientific understanding from the earliest days of the scientific revolution.
    In opposition to the reductionist view is a more recent school of thought termed
holism,
whose philosophy can be summarized by the simple statement: ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’, and so appears to negate the reductionist view. Holism contends that within complex systems in particular, unexpected emergent properties arise that cannot be derived by examining the individual components of the system (by emergent properties we mean that there are properties at the higher and more complex level that are not observed at lower levels). This approach has gained considerable influence in recent years, specifically with regard to the biological sciences, due to the extraordinary complexity of even so-called ‘simple’ biological systems, and has led to the establishment of a new branch in biology—systems biology. Carl Woese’s view of biological systems as ‘complex dynamic organization’, rather than as a ‘molecular machine’ whose behaviour can be understood from its component parts, illustrates this new ‘systems’ way of thinking. 1
    So which is the better approach for addressing biological problems—reduction or holism? That depends on who you ask. Jacques Monod 10 offered a rather disparaging view of holism (and holists)with his comment: ‘A most foolish and wrongheaded quarrel it is, merely testifying to the “holists”
[sic]
profound misappreciation of the scientific method and of the crucial role analysis plays in it.’ The confusion surrounding the apparent conflict between reductionism and holism as applied to biological systems is a long-standing one and graphically illustrated in the proceedings of a conference entitled ‘Problems of Reduction in Biology’ attended by a group of leading biologists and philosophers, including Peter Medawar, Jacques Monod, and Karl Popper that took place in September 1972, in Bellagio, Italy. At the end of that meeting June Goodfield was reported as saying:
I am overpowered by a feeling of
déjà vu
verging at times on the very edge of intellectual impotence. ‘Reductionism’ ‘anti-reductionism’ ‘beyond reductionism’ ‘holism’…. The issue is a very old one recurring in various forms with unfailing regularity throughout biological history, and the feeling of impotence arises because, after all this time, the issue never seems to get any clearer. 21
     
    Well, almost forty years on and little seems to have changed. Reduction and holism in biology seem as controversial now as then. A recent polemical essay by Denis Noble that comes down firmly on the side of holism, discusses the same dilemmas, though illustrated with examples from modern systems biology. 22 Carl Woese, a reborn holist, puts it even more starkly:
Biology today is at a crossroad. The molecular paradigm, which so successfully guided the discipline throughout most of the 20th century, is no longer a reliable guide. Its vision of biology now realized, the molecular paradigm has run its course. Biology, therefore, has a choice to