The Humpty-Dumpty Problem

Reductionism as a research strategy in biology has proven phenomenally successful. The ascendancy of the life sciences, from the discovery of DNA in 1954 to the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, attests to the power of the reductionist approach. The promise of reductionism rested on the belief that an intelligent dissection of complex phenomena would not only yield progress, but would eventually reduce any problem to its component parts. The current emphasis on interactions also ushers in a new kind of conceptual harmony in biology. The latter half of the 20th century was marked by an apparent and unnecessary gulf between those branches of biology that studied parts and those that focused on organisms and ecosystems. Evolution has crafted the very relation between parts and wholes that our science should seek to emulate: Neither is viable without the other. The questions we are asking as biologists are profound and profoundly difficult.