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Yesterday a Church of England member announced that the institution owes Charles Darwin an apology. Writing directly to Darwin, the Rev Malcolm Brown said the church should be penitent "for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still…
A female lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) photographed at the Bronx zoo in 2007.According to Reuters the Spanish Congress is set to extend legal rights to apes in captivity, ending cruel experiments, isolation in circuses, and other forms of mistreatment. (Zoos will still be allowed to keep apes…
A capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) at the Cape May Zoo. Josephoartigasia dwarfs this animal, the largest of the living rodents. One of the most interesting evolutionary patterns is an increase in the disparity of sizes in a group, small representatives persisting and changing even as some…
If Huckabee shows up for Science Debate 2008, maybe he should spend a little time at the Academy of Natural Sciences (just a stone's throw away from the Franklin Institute); he might just learn something about paleontology & evolution. Then again, he might be inspired to engage in some…
I loathe the word "reductionism". It's one of those words which is used as a substitute for a substantive critique, and because the meaning varies sharply among speakers, the particular nature of the insult must be deduced from context each time. I hear it bandied about at complex-systems conferences, often in such horrendous constructions as "We're moving beyond the reductionist paradigm"; when one examines the paradigm-shifting work in question, it turns out to be just as "reductionist" as the thing it was replacing. Some folks will lambaste as "reductionist" any claim that a bit of the world admits of an explanation. . . .
And whether quantum, ahem, mechanics undermines the "mechanical" view of the world is not so much a "fact" but a matter of how fussily you define what a "mechanistic worldview" might be. Are computers machines? Well, integrated circuits are ultimately built upon the quantum theory of solids.
Blake; I'm usually wary of "reductionism" when I hear it used in actual scientific critiques, as well. It's generally bandied about as a dirty word (like paraphyletic) and immediate puts people on the defensive. Nonetheless, I did find the sketch above to be amusing.
What made me laugh about the sketch wasn't so much that I know scientists hold such narrow views (even those included in the title of the post) but that I know some members of the public who have such misunderstandings. I have met some people who are convinced there is a gene "for" this or that, and once we get the genome all sorted out we'll just be sort of Skinnerian beings reacting to stimuli based upon what our genes tell us to do.
Still, I think the term "reductionist" can be used properly when (if?) researchers attempt to explain the whole of a complex system merely by breaking it down into simple parts and explaining the action of those parts. Such applications should be used with care, however, and it is probably that "reductionism" will continue to be a dirty word.
It's not that watching John Cleese isn't fun, it's that griping and grousing about the people I get stuck talking to in the Marriott banquet hall is more so. :-)
Physics has lots of good words for various kinds of problem-solving attacks and modes of description. One can use a "linearized approximation" or posit a "weakly interacting system" or start with a "mean-field theory". . . Of course, because these terms have meaning, it's harder to sound profound when saying them.
(The Geometry of Ecological Interactions (2000) is a pretty good treatment of one way in which these different types of approximation have moved beyond physics.)