Reductionism
Harvard biologist, and two-time Pulitzer-Prize winner, Edward O. Wilson, in his 1998 book Consilience, stated that "the cutting edge of science is reductionism, the breaking apart of nature into its natural constituents." The journal Nature, in 1997, defined reductionism as the search "to explain the wide variety of natural phenomena by the behavior of limited numbers of simpler constituents subject to rigorous and simple laws."
A reductionist approach has been perhaps most successful in molecular biology, which, one author has argued "constitutes a research program that attempts to explain and understand biological systems completely in terms of the physical interactions of their parts." Reductionism in molecular biology has led to many advances in explaining the molecular basis, most spectacularly, of human disease, but also to sometimes startling advances in such fields as immunology and developmental biology.
Still, considerable debate has raged over the merits of reductionism. E.O. Wilson's ascendant field of sociobiology has been attacked for its genetic determinism, especially for its repeated assumption that the residual of phenomena unexplained by reductionism "shrinks as knowledge increases." The most controversial implication is that eventually all human behavior can be reduced to explanations at the level of the gene. Contrarily, most biologists would argue that it is not possible to reduce explanation of biological phenomena to the presently ultimate simplicity of subatomic particles.
The controversy has been intensified recently by the debate centered on the current Human Genome Project (HGP). Most biologists seem to agree that comprehensive mapping to locate genes precisely on chromosomes is a worthwhile project, so the controversy swirls around the purposes, ultimate value, and expense of total sequencing of the entire human genome. Some of the advocates of the HGP expect it to lead eventually to a better grasp of the interactions among genes and ultimately to "calculation" of the entire behavior of the organism. Skeptics argue that this is blind reductionism, that such expectations exhibit a reductionist naivete about biochemistry and organismal biology. As the authors of a recent article in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine suggest: "The HGP is the ultimate product of an extreme reductionist vision of biology that has held that to understand better one need only to go smaller."
The debate came into focus sharply in the Novartis Foundation symposium on the limits of reductionism in biology in 1997. Some consensus emerged: (1) on the belief that it is probably not very useful to try to reduce explanations of biological phenomena to the level of particles in physics (even if it could be done); (2) on the importance of whole organisms and of their current and past interactions with their environments; and (3) that adequate explanation and understanding depend on working at the appropriate level, not just the lowest level achievable.
Reductionism is now, and has been for some time, the dominant paradigm in biology and in all of the empirical sciences. Some scholars advocate systems theory, hierarchy theory, and holism, or some combination of these, as viable alternatives. These have become fundamental to some disciplines, e.g., ecology, but have not reached the level of acceptance among scientists that the reductionist approach has; neither have these alternatives been anywhere near as successful. Research in biology, and in all the other sciences, will no doubt continue to depend primarily on a reductionist approach, but will also increasingly incorporate alternative perspectives in a way complementary to reductionism.
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