What is your view of reductionism?

[Drag]

I am reading a book by Ernst Mayr 'After Darwin', he mostly talks there about metodology and philosophy of biology.
He advocates an interesting idea, about which I would like to ask the opinoins in this forum.

He say that biology can't be reduced to the physics and chemistry and should be studied as it is. The main idea is that 'the whole is more than the summ of its parts'. Meaning that when we try to go from the physical and chemical level up to the level of biological system, on each etape new properties of the system appear and it is impossible to predict them. The only valid approach is to study them as they are. On the other hand he doesn't doubt the validity of the physical laws.

I have mixed feelings about this idea. I have no doubts that in principle we can reconstruct and understand any biological system starting with the laws of physics. On the other hand, in practice this approach doesn't always work, even in chemistry where we have problems in precicting the properites of the matter even if we know its chemical composition. We need to study each level of organisation of matter separately, finding, at best, some connections with the lower level of organisation.

What are your thoughts on this issue? Biologists are especially welcome [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].
And the question is not restricted to the 'physics vs biology'. What do you think about the whole idea of reduction? (Don't forget that it had some big success in th past: reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics.)

[tame_deuces]

It's fairly standard. When you can't model something using the models of the systems that makes it up, you have to do this.

It is also completely standard practice in physics to do this, and you can find many examples of it, the most common is to imagine 'perfect' versions of what you are trying to model.

So this is no 'physics vs biology' thing, it is a standard academic practice, until you can do better.

[carlo]

Yes, of course its an idea long overdue but I thought biologists have in the past studied it from this viewpoint but with the advent of modern physics the physicists model began to take precedence.

The difficulty is that physics and physicists deal with INORGANIC matter and of course biologists deal with LIVING beings. I believe that it was a scientist named Francesco Redi who stated that LIFE CAN ONLY COME FROM LIFE. this was in response to a common belief that out of the carcasses of dead animalsliving beings could grow(plant and animal).

The short of it is that nature only shows the MINERAL COMING FROM THE LIVING(death) but not vice versa.Physics in its intrusion into living beings posits that from the mineral kingdom somehow a living being can be produced and therefore we have our "big bang" soup or explosion if you will.

Your post made me realize that in the tremors on this forum I completely forgot that Dawkins is a physicist and Dennett(is he) is a cognitive scientist(psychologist). A grand foray into biology. Any resentment in the field?

Goethe's morphological archtypes are good read in consideration of biology. By any chance did he mention Goethe in his book?

[Phil153]

carlo,

What do you think drives the apparatus of a cell? Does the holy ghost inhabit ectoplasm?

It seems curious to me with our modern understanding of cell mechanics that someone would think a cell is more than an intricate collection of molecular mechanical parts.

[carlo]

[ QUOTE ]
carlo,

What do you think drives the apparatus of a cell? Does the holy ghost inhabit ectoplasm?

It seems curious to me with our modern understanding of cell mechanics that someone would think a cell is more than an intricate collection of molecular mechanical parts.


[/ QUOTE ]

I'd like to make clear as to what you're asking. You're saying that a cell has specific parts and pieces(mitochondria, DNA, transfer DNA,endoplasm, ectoplasm,etc.) and through these entities a picture of the mechanism comes out which should confirm that life can come from its separate parts. I believe that recently there was a post or I saw it on the internet that a scientist believes that they believe that they could produce life by combining genetic material. Would be interesting to see what happens.

In my post I did not state that I had given the answer to the question of "life" but that empirical knowledge clarifies that the progression of mineral matter(periodic table of the elements) to life is nowhere seen in nature. This of course does not stop the physicists from hypothesizing that it not only can and did billions of years ago. Empirically there is no evidence for this and the study of inorganic chemistry will confirm the same. You may be aiming the "holy Ghost" thing at me but I state that the modern view of inorganic to organic over billions of years is in itself a superstition and definitely depends upon a "magical nimbus" for which this great modern enchantment of physics is responsible.

By the way, last night(9/4) I made a post concerning Anthroposophical findings concerning "life" in relation to the human being.I believe it had something to do with karma, as per my usual stuff. Read that and we can discuss more.

Found it. Read the "questions about heaven" post.

[Drag]

[ QUOTE ]

It's fairly standard. When you can't model something using the models of the systems that makes it up, you have to do this.

So this is no 'physics vs biology' thing, it is a standard academic practice, until you can do better.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I know this, and I work in physical engineering.

The question is: Can we do better? Is it always possible to make such a reduction? From the physics point of view, it seems that yes. We take a bunch of molecules assemble them in the right way and voila: a living cell. Take a bunch of cells, assemble them in the right way: a brain.

Is is always possible to work from the down to the top in the scale of things? Or we need to analyse the things on a new level without connection to the lower level. Like we write the 'laws' of biology without thinking if they are connected to the fundamental laws of physics.

[Drag]

And please don't turn it into the religeous debate, I was mostly interested in which approach is more effective: reduction to the lower levels or analysis at the existing level.

[tame_deuces]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

It's fairly standard. When you can't model something using the models of the systems that makes it up, you have to do this.

So this is no 'physics vs biology' thing, it is a standard academic practice, until you can do better.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, I know this, and I work in physical engineering.

The question is: Can we do better? Is it always possible to make such a reduction? From the physics point of view, it seems that yes. We take a bunch of molecules assemble them in the right way and voila: a living cell. Take a bunch of cells, assemble them in the right way: a brain.

Is is always possible to work from the down to the top in the scale of things? Or we need to analyse the things on a new level without connection to the lower level. Like we write the 'laws' of biology without thinking if they are connected to the fundamental laws of physics.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ok, then I get you better. And this is actually a very very good question IMHO.

I think the truth is that you need both. Imagine a caveman observing a car standing still, I find it hard to believe he would ever grasp the concept of a car by looking at the car and studying its individual parts. At some point I think he needs to see the car 'in action' to grasp the concept of what a car is. But after that he could maybe start understanding its more specific systems better and start using a more specialized approach in figuring out what it was.

But at the same time, some 17th century humans could probably use their 'levels of knowledge' to figure out what a car is by looking at one standing still, but mostly because they have some grasp of the principle of automated transportation on wheels.

An engineer from 1980 could probably be shown a large amounts of parts from modern cars and understand their impact on what a car is.

So it's all about where you are on the knowledge 'level' of what you are studying. And please forgive my use of imagery, but it was hard to write this without it. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Metric]

People who strenuously argue against reductionism are only setting themselves up for embarassment later on. Of course it is (at present) useful to think of biology it terms that are more or less independent from fundamental physics, but this is only because of our current state of ignorance.

Similarly, I tend to think of my laptop computer in terms that are more or less independent from the fundamental concepts and theorems in computer science, but this is again due to my ignorance and not due to any fundametal disconnect between what my laptop computer is doing and the pioneering work of the first computer scientists.

[hexag1]

You are right that biological phenomena can be understood at the physical level, but its generally impractical to do so.
We should take this observation at face value. One must be careful not to infer that physical modeling of life is an intractable problem because it is currently out of reach practically.
Michael Behe (author of "Darwin's Black Box" and "The Edge of Evolution: Searching for the limits of Darwinism") has jumped on this difficulty as evidence of irreducible complexity in living things. Its easy for some thinkers to look at the gap between physics and biology and see some hidden or magical force at work. A mysterious green gas, or some other vitalistic force behind it.
This gap is the only place left for dualists to look for their magic.

Daniel Dennett has written quite forcefully about this topic in his books, particularly in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life". In that book he takes a equally critical look at dualist theories (e.g. Penrose) and their counterparts, which he calls 'greedy reductionism' (e.g. BF Skinner's behaviorism), pretty well crushing both sides.

Dennett has some excellent analysis of this stuff in Kinds of Minds chapter 2, which I posted in another thread below. Basically, hes saying that we can best understand biological organisms at a level higher than chemistry/physics(just like Mayer is saying), by treating the molecules and organisms as rational agents. He calls this "the Intentional Stance".