Modern science is the discipline that tries to understand the world around us. We, scientists, want to figure out the fundamental mechanisms, laws and rules that dictate the ways things exist, work and change. The essential component of modern science is observation and reproducibility. The subjects or phenomena need to be reproducibly observable. Something invisible with human eyes has been visualized with various tools. With languages and logic, something invisible is conceived and eventually, its existence is visualized. In other words, if something is not reproducibly observed, modern science cannot verify it and often disregard it. Like from Alchemy to Chemistry and from Astrology to Astronomy.
To secure reproducibility, modern science uses reduced approaches. A complex whole is reduced into small parts that are easier to deal with. Each small part is carefully controlled and conditioned to reproduce the observation. This permits the dissection of its mechanisms, and often allows the determination of the cause-consequence from many associations. It is important to define everything as much as possible to secure reproducibility. However, it is very difficult to achieve in the real world.
Modern scientists put a lot of effort into solving each reduced small part and reconstructing the solved parts back into the original whole. Can we understand the whole this way? Aristoteles said, “a whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Is he wrong? Reductionism appears to work very well in physics. Reducing scale and putting it back to the original, like an architect’s blueprint for a building and calculation of structural strength, is working well. However, in biology, the effectiveness of reductionism is only partial. Something making Biology unique seems absent in reductionism. What exactly disappeared?
I think there are three main problems in reductionism. One is represented in the story of ‘blindmen and an elephant’. Without knowing the clear boundaries of each small part, the reconstituted whole would be a gigantic monster. Second, there is more than one strategy for reducing. Imagine the famous illusion drawing of an old or young lady. It is impossible to simultaneously conceive both of them. Each reducing strategy creates a constraint for the logic working within it. The eye for an old lady is the ear for a young lady. This does not make sense. Once we choose one reducing strategy, the other possibilities are disregarded or neglected.
The third problem is that live things are not simply gathered materials. They have dynamics and information. Once we reduce to lower levels, the upper-level dynamics and information will disappear. I recognize similar phenomena in literature. As a whole, we perceive something from a story in a book. If we reduce it to the levels of words or letters, such as the word ‘the’ is used 1253 times or the letter ‘s’ can be found 38451 times, we obtain precise correct data, but something would be gone completely. The information of the story disappears. I think that scale, time, complexity and step can be reduced and reconstituted back. However, the sequence cannot. If sequence carries information like an alphabet order in a word, a word order in a sentence and a paragraph order in a story, as soon as we reduce it, the encoded information will be gone.
I think living things carry the essential information as sequences at various layers of the nested structure. I can list a few, such as DNA sequences for a gene, amino acid sequences for a protein, gene order sequences for an operon in prokaryotes, gene order sequences (DNA synteny) for a body plan for a multicellular organism. Interestingly, the ability to self-assemble to the double-strand DNA helix is important but cannot help in creating the DNA sequence. The affinity of peptides can create high level self-assembled structures, but the sequence of amino acids within a peptide cannot be self-assembled. What this is telling us is that reductionism cannot cross over multiple layers of the nested structure beyond one information system of sequence.
In modern science, once people recognize that one particular way of reducing strategies operates well, everyone starts using it and keeps digging deep with the same logic. This becomes the dogma that is tightly linked with the rationale of the reducing strategy. Interestingly, many subsequent studies are self-enforcing the dogma but not validating it. This process builds common knowledge in people sharing the same dogma. Next generations will be educated by textbooks summarizing the history of the accepted dogma at the given time. Then, the dogma is further stabilized and creates vested interests. However, something we should never forget is that the accepted reducing strategy is not the only functional one. The one taken at a given time would help to advance the field for some time, but it might not work for an infinite time. With technological advances in their own field or others, conflicted observations would be identified as an exception by a small number of people. Then, the dogma is eventually replaced by a new one. Our history has proven that this happened over and over, such as geocentric vs heliocentric views of the universe, Newtonian physics vs quantum physics and relativity.
The dogma and dogmatic perspectives are difficult to turn around because of their associated vested interests. I understand the challenge of accepting new perspectives when someone says that something I believe, rely on or put a value on, is not what I think it is. However, like Pandora’s box in Greek mythology, once someone conceives a new perspective, there is no turning back. That is the human history.
I thank Selina Zhao for English editing.
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