Theos-Talk Archives (December 2001 Message tt00173)

This is an exert from a book I am currently reading
titled "Heirarchy Theory: The Challenge of Complex
Systems" edited by H. H. Pattee pages 24-26.


"I will close with some remarks about reductionism and
the structure of the sciences....There are at least
two versions of the concept of explanation in science.
In both versions, of course, explaining a phenomena
involves reducing it to other phenomena that are, in
some sense, more fundamental.

But with agreement on this point, the two concepts of
explanation branch. The one concept - let me call it
Laplacian - takes as its ideal the formulation of a
single set of equations describing behaviour at the
most microscopic, the most fundamental level, from
which all macrophenomena are to follow and to be
deduced. No one, of course, believes the program could
actually be carried out - the equations, when written,
would be far to hard to solve. In spite of that, the
concept has practical consequences in the real world,
for it influences some scientists' choices of research
problems - their view of what is "really" fundamental.

The second concept - for lack of a better name let me
call it Mendelian - takes as its ideal the formulation
of laws that express the invariant relations between
successive levels of heirarchical structures. It aims
at discovering as many bodies of scientific law as
there are pairs of successive levels - a theory of
particle physics, one of atomic physics, one of
molecular chemistry, one of biochemsitry, and so on.
Since the world of nature is a nearly decomposable
system, and since the invariant properties of a nearly
decomposable system have this layered quality, the
fundamental scientific laws must take this form also.

Since, in the second view, nature is only nearly
(italics) decomposable, not completely (italics)
decomposable, many of the most beautiful regularities
of nature will only be approximate regularities. They
will fall short of exactness because the properties of
the lower level, higher frequency subsystems will
"show through" faintly into the behaviour of the
higher level, lower frequency systems.....

If we were to make a list of the most important, the
most beautiful laws of natural science that have been
discovered in the last three centuries, we would see
that the vast majority of them only hold
approximately, and only if we are willing to ignore
details of the microstructure. The pattern expressed
by these laws is simply not present in the underlying,
detailed Laplacian equations.

I do not want to present a one sided case. The fact
that nature is hierarchic does not mean that phenomena
at several levels cannot, even in the Mendelian view,
have common mechanisms. Relativistic quantum mechanics
has had spectacular success in dealing with phenomena
ranging all the way from the level of the atomic
nucleus to the level of tertiary structure in organic
molecules." end quote.


hmmmmmm....perhaps scientists would save a lot of time
if they were assigned The Secret Doctrine as a text to
study in first year.

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