THE IMPORTANCE OF REDUCTIONISM

??????????? E.O. Wilson argued that the triumph of Western science (and presumably of Western civilization) followed from its ability to dissect impossibly difficult problems into smaller separate problems that could be solved.? This approach to science flowed out of Europe’s period of Enlightenment and was promoted by philosopher Rene’ Descartes.?

??????????? Reductionism, given its unbroken string of successes during the next three centuries, may seem today the obvious and best way to have constructed knowledge of the physical world, but it was not so easy to grasp at the dawn of science.? Chinese scholars never achieved it.? They possessed the same intellectual ability as Western scientists, as evidenced by the fact that, even though far more isolated, they acquired scientific information as rapidly as did the Arabs, who had all of Greek knowledge as a launching ramp.? Between the first and thirteenth centuries they led Europe by a wide margin.? But according to Joseph Needham, the principal Western chronicler of Chinese scientific endeavors, their focus stayed on holistic properties and on the harmonious, hierarchical relationship of entities, from stars down to mountains and flowers and sand.? In this world view the entities of Nature are inseparable and perpetually changing, not discrete and constant as perceived by the Enlightenment thinkers.? As a result the Chinese never hit upon the entry point of abstraction and break-apart analytical research attained by European science in the seventeenth century.

??????????? Why no Descartes or Newton under the Heavenly Mandate?? The reasons were historical and religious.? The Chinese had a distaste for abstract codified law, stemming from their unhappy experience with the Legalists, rigid quantifiers of the law who ruled during the transition from feudalism to bureaucracy in the Ch’in dynasty (221-206 B.C.).? Legalism was based on the belief that people are fundamentally anti-social and must be bent to laws that place the security of the state to above their personal desires.? Of probable even greater importance, Chinese scholars abandoned the idea of a supreme being with personal and creative properties.? No rational Author of Nature existed in their universe; consequently the objects they meticulously described did not follow universal principles, but instead operated within particular rules followed by those entities in the cosmic order.? In the absence of a compelling need for the notion of general laws – thoughts in the mind of God, so to speak – little or no search? was made for them.

??????????? Western science took the lead largely because it cultivated reductionism and physical law to expand the understanding of space in time beyond that attainable by the on dictated senses.

??????????? In 1684 Newton formulated the mass and distance laws of gravity, and in 1687 the three laws of motion.? With these mathematical formulations he achieved the first great breakthrough in modern science.? He showed that the planetary orbits postulated by Copernicus and proved elliptical by Kepler can be predicted from the first principles of mechanics.? His triumph enshrined Cartesian reductionism in the conduct of science.

??????????? Biologists study cells by breaking them up into their components and studying the structure and function of the organelles that make them up.? They dissect cell structure even further by reducing the organelles into their component molecules and then studying the structure of those molecules.

??????????? Many fields construct mathematical models that approximate, but do not exactly match, the behavior of an aspect of their field.? At first, the model is crude and only approximates.? As new factors are added, though, the model matches nature more closely.?

??????????? Reductionism enables scientists to gain insight into a problem, but it is not the end.? After the behavior of the isolated components has been worked out, the knowledge gained by each examination of each component is pooled and applied to the whole structure or system.? This is important, since systems often have emergent properties - properties due to an interaction of their components that isn’t present in the isolated components.?? The idea of emergent properties is central to science and especially to the field of biology - this limits the usefulness of reductionism.? But even with this limitation, reductionism has been critical to the development and advancement of science.?

??????????? Science had a head start in China, India, Arabia, and Africa.? Scholars in these regions of the world correctly point out “our area had well defined art, literature, and science when Europeans were throwing sticks and stones at each other.”? But the science that we perform came out of the European Enlightenment; it bears this pedigree mainly because of the West’s ability and willingness to pursue reductionism.

??????????? There is a price to pay for reductionism, though.? The price has been the division of a continuous natural world into separation disciplines and the specialization of the practitioners in their fields of astronomy, biology, geology, chemistry, and physics.? Few astronomers know biology, and vice verse.? The vast increase in scientific knowledge has forced practicing scientists to devote their efforts to a minute specialty.? Science has been fragmented, and although this fragmentation is artificial, it has occurred.??

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