Reductionism and Biology
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great article that I found recently on Reductionism in Biology. Synthesis, or holism, is nice and all, but you can’t really understand something without identifying and understanding its constituent parts. The intro below the fold…
Reductionism encompasses a set of ontological, epistemological, and methodological claims about the relation of different scientific domains. The basic question of reduction is whether the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from one scientific domain (typically at higher levels of organization) can be deduced from or explained by the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from another domain of science (typically one about lower levels of organization). Reduction is germane to a variety of issues in philosophy of science, including the structure of scientific theories, the relations between different scientific disciplines, the nature of explanation, the diversity of methodology, and the very idea of theoretical progress, as well as to numerous topics in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, such as emergence, mereology, and supervenience.
In recent philosophy of biology (1970s to the early 1990s), the primary debate about reduction has focused on the question of whether (and in what sense) classical genetics can be reduced to molecular biology. Another less prominent strand of discussion concerns whether evolutionary theory is inherently anti-reductionist because of the principle of natural selection. In the past decade, philosophical debate has shifted to also include whether developmental biology can be reduced to molecular genetics. Philosophical interest about reduction in biology is pervasive throughout the history of philosophy and science. Many contemporary debates have historical analogues, reflecting long-standing controversies among biologists about the legitimacy of reductionist research strategies and modes of explanation used by different life science subdisciplines.
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Dan Rhoads
Dan is an American working in industry in a small Mediterranean country. He has a BSc in Molecular Biology and a PhD in Cancer Pharmacology and Biochemistry.
June 20th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy expects authors to revise their entries on a regular basis. To this end, I and my co-author Alan Love set up a discussion thread on our “Reductionism in Biology” entry, gathering comments that we will consider when revising the entry in the future.
The discussion thread is at http://philbiocafe.utah.edu/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=133
Feel free to comment on our entry there!
Ingo