Daggah

I'm reading The Blind Watchmaker right now, and I just finished reading the comments on page 13 about reductionism. To me, it seems fairly basic...what are the arguments against it?

tronvillain

As Dawkins says on that page:

Francois Tremblay

Has anyone read Consilience, by Edward Wilson ? It's the book that I'm starting to read right now. I read negative reviews by flakes like Gould who think reductionism is useless. What's up with these guys ? I guess they're more evidence that people specialized in one field shouldn't imagine they are specialists in everything...

Never mind. I write this a few hours after the first paragraph above. After reading the first 70 pages of the book, I realize that it has numerous grievous philosophical errors. I don't think now that any consistent reductionism can be done without a solid philosophical basis.

[ February 10, 2002: Message edited by: Franc28 ]</p>

Kent Stevens

Some people may not like the idea of reductionism as it goes against traditional religious ideas. For example, the spirit of someone traditionally cannot be broken up into parts. It is supposed to be one whole entity created by God.

With modern science we can see that a person can be reduced to a collection of atoms. These atoms in turn can be further reduced.

The mistake would be to say that a person is nothing but a collection of atoms. This would ignore the big differences between when someone is alive or dead, or when they are young or old. These states are qualitatively different even though the atoms making up the person are the same. It would be overly simplistic to say that you are only a collection of atoms.

People such as Gould object to Dawkins in saying that the latter commits genetic reductionism. To say that we only consist of genes trying to reproduce themselves, ignores the fact that we have minds for example. These minds might end up going against what the genes want which is to reproduce.

Reductionism is not wrong. You just need to be cautious not to over simplify things and ignore the whole person for example.

Oolon Colluphid

I think it was either Dawkins or Dennett who described this straw man variety of reductionism as 'greedy reductionism'. David Deutsch has also written some interesting stuff about appropriate levels of explanation in The Fabric of Reality -- highly recommended.

Oolon

ohwilleke

The argument against reductionism (a common flaw of physical scientists), is that when you try to reduce a complex system to a set of simple rules that you miss important things that are going on.

For example, weather is a complex system. The stereotypical reductionist would say: "Weather is a physical system government by Newtonian physics and general chemistry which we have down pat, therefore we don't need to study weather." Yet, it isn't sufficient to know all the rules of physics to really understand weather.

As another example, the reductionist would think that the important thing to know about chess is the rules, yet books and books are written about it and it is far harder to understand than it seems.

"The end of science" idea is a reductionist notion that fails to recognize how complex the world really is.

[ February 18, 2002: Message edited by: ohwilleke ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

If I may add to what ohwilleke says: in a nutshell, greedy reductionism misses emergent properties of a system. It's not that Newtonian physics cannot explain the weather, it's that when things get sufficiently complex, they have characteristics not apparent from the more basic elements alone; thus the lower level of explanation ceases to be a useful explanation.

David Deutsch gives this example: if you want to explain how a particular copper atom at the tip of the nose of Churchill's statue outside the House of Commons came to be there, you could (potentially) quite accurately say that the particular form of the Big Bang meant that the copper atom followed this particular, complicated trajectory through space and time, from this star to this position relative to this planet. Or you could explain it in terms of war and leadership, why statues are erected and why they are frequently made of bronze. Both are 'correct', but one is rather more useful than the other as an explanation -- which is what science is all about.

Cheers, Oolon

tronvillain

So in other words, reductionism is good, but don't get greedy.

echidna

Not seeing the forest for the trees, or the trees for the cells, or the cells for the molecules or the molecules for the quarks ?

What was all that about seeing anyway ?