Original research
Chance between holism and reductionism: Tensions in the conceptualisation of Life

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2012.05.005Get rights and content

Abstract

In debates between holism and reductionism in biology, from the early twentieth century to more recent re-enactments involving genetic reductionism, developmental systems theory or systems biology, the role of chance – the presence of theories invoking chance as a strong explanatory principle – is hardly ever acknowledged. Conversely, Darwinian models of chance and selection (Dennett, 1995; Kupiec, 1996, 2009) sit awkwardly with reductionist and holistic concepts, which they alternately challenge or approve of. I suggest that the juxtaposition of chance and the holism–reductionism pair (at multiple levels, ontological and methodological, pertaining to the vision of scientific practice as well as to the foundations of a vision of Nature, implicit or explicit) allows the theorist to shed some new light on these perennial tensions in the conceptualisation of Life.

Introduction

The juxtaposition of chance with the more familiar pair of holism and reductionism in biology may at first sight seem rather surprising. Chance is both an ancient philosophical problem, as addressed – quite differently – by Aristotle, Lucretius or Diderot (Gigandet, 2002; Wolfe, 2010c; Pépin, 2012); a concept closely linked to the emergence of ‘modern’ biology, from Darwin to the study of genetic mutations; today it is discussed in a new way on both the experimental and theoretical planes, particularly in the more manipulable form of stochasticity (Kupiec et al., 2009/2011; Kupiec, 2010). Holism is a term that always carries with it a residual dimension of mystery, referring initially to a set of positions that goes back to Aristotle and Hegel, then – most relevantly for our topic here – to a position in theoretical biology inspired by general systems theory (Smuts, 1926/1999; Ash, 1995); in a more existential sense, it is also associated with the ‘organicism’ of Kurt Goldstein (Goldstein, 1995). Holism has also been revived more recently in analytic philosophy with Robert Brandom and John McDowell (for recent analyses of holism in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language see Esfeld, 1999 and Block, 1998). But for our purposes ‘holism’ is a certain type of claim about how specifically living beings – organisms overall, but particularly live ones – should be considered as wholes, even if there is no rigorous, clear-cut distinction or relation between holism, systems theory and specifically organismic claims about the uniqueness of living beings.1

Briefly put, models appealing to chance are (philosophically) anti-essentialist: they reject the appeal to higher-level, irreducible properties of a system by retracing the causal process which generated them, based on stochastic processes. It seems intuitively right – and empirically indeed to be the case – that models favouring the role of chance tend to be compatible with reduction, or reductionism as an ontological and/or explanatory position according to which for any given Whole there will always be subjacent components which themselves can explain, with or without ‘bonuses’ such as bridge laws or structural features, the overall function of this Whole. But little attention has been paid to this relation between chance, anti-essentialism and reduction.

For instance, a Darwinian model of chance and selection (Dennett, 1995; Kupiec, 1996) seems to be in conflict with a systemic holism as put forth in Varela and his partisans (Weber and Varela, 2002; Rudrauf et al., 2003), who tend to insist on the irreducible individuality of systems (or worse, a metaphysics of Life) rather than their production through stochastic processes, or similarly in their insistence on the existence of a foundational centre or Self in living systems (Wolfe, 2010b). In contrast, this postulate seems absent from the work of Moreno and his collaborators (Ruiz-Mirazo et al., 2000), which shows that it is possible to articulate an organisational – and hence weakly holistic – model without adjoining it to the individualism or anti-Darwinism of a Varela (Bechtel, 2007). I suggest that the juxtaposition of chance with the holism–reductionism pair (at multiple levels, ontological and methodological, pertaining to the vision of scientific practice as well as to the foundations of a vision of Nature, implicit or explicit) allows the theorist to shed some new light on these perennial tensions in the conceptualisation of Life.

Section snippets

2.

When we think of the role of chance in biology – the presence of chance, or more restrictively, ‘stochastic processes’ as productive in biology (and I leave aside the question, ‘productive of what?’ – of order? of particular organisms? of structures enabling the generation of organisms? – in order to merely stress: the idea that a chance and selection model is productive) we often think of Darwin. We can augment his ideas of variation and natural selection (in which chance plays the role of

3.

Curiously, if we map out these positions in theoretical biology, they bear a striking resemblance to the landscape in contemporary moral philosophy – specifically regarding freedom versus determinism. A brief comparison should make this obvious. In analytic philosophy, the basic positions in the debate over whether we are free agents or simple parts of a deterministic universe, are usually presented as follows (with each of these obviously coming in different forms, weak or strong, pure or

4.

This anti-essentialism entails, or rather is expressed crucially in the fact that, notably unlike Schrödinger in What is Life? (to name a famous, and perhaps foundational example; Schrödinger, 1944), Kupiec does not recognise the existence of something like a program; “Because of the stochastic nature of protein interaction and gene expression, [Kupiec] says, there can be no Aristotelian form or programme to give order to life and ward off entropic chaos and death” (Werner, 2009, p. 35).

5.

I suggested earlier that my proposed triangulation between holism, reductionism and chance produces some curious effects. Indeed, from Lucretius to Diderot, Darwin and Tyndall7

6.

One may ask at this point, what happens to the organism in this triangulation (where we seem to be moving in the direction of a kind of enhanced reductionism rather than holism)? At first, we get perhaps too strong a form of demystification (that is, reduction), with Kupiec's frequent accusations of ‘animism’ – that holism is animistic in the sense that it attributes an inherent creative force or activity to matter itself – which risk losing sight, not of the mysterious norganism or the

Conclusion

The confrontation between chance, holism and reductionism – their triangulation, as I have called it, namely, the attempt to evaluate Kupiec's new brand of Darwinism in terms of its way of positioning itself with respect to these ‘families’ of theoretical positions – produces a de-essentialised vision of Nature in general and the status of living beings in particular, without however entirely overcoming the need to address the latter status. Most interesting perhaps is what happens to the

Acknowledgements

I thank Thomas Pradeu for his critical remarks on an earlier draft, and I benefited greatly from the reviewers' comments.

References (77)

  • M.H. Bickhard et al.

    Variations in variation and selection: the ubiquity of the variation-and-selective-retention ratchet in emergent organizational complexity

    Found. Sci.

    (2003)
  • J. Bickle

    Reducing mind to molecular pathways: explicating the reductionism implicit in current cellular and molecular neuroscience

    Synthese

    (2006)
  • N. Block

    Holism: mental and semantic

  • J.-C. Bourdin

    La rencontre du matérialisme et de l'aléatoire chez Louis Althusser

    Multitudes

    (2005)
  • L.W. Buss

    The Evolution of Individuality

    (1987)
  • W. Coleman

    The cognitive basis of the discipline: Claude Bernard on physiology

    Isis

    (1985)
  • R. Dawkins

    The Selfish Gene

    (1976)
  • de La Mettrie J.O., 1748/1960. L'Homme-Machine. Vartanian, A. (Ed.), Princeton University Press,...
  • D.C. Dennett

    Darwin's Dangerous Idea

    (1995)
  • D. Depew et al.

    Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection

    (1996)
  • J. Dewey

    The influence of Darwin on philosophy

  • E. Du Bois-Reymond

    The limits of our knowledge of nature (original publication 1872)

    Popular Science Monthly

    (1874)
  • M. Ereshefsky

    What's wrong with the new biological essentialism

    Phil. Sci.

    (2010)
  • M. Esfeld

    Physicalism and ontological holism

    Metaphilosophy

    (1999)
  • R. Falk et al.

    Harmony from discord

    Biol. Phil.

    (1992)
  • J. Gayon

    Déterminisme génétique, déterminisme bernardien, déterminisme laplacien

  • A. Gigandet

    Lucrèce vu en songe. Diderot, Le rêve de D'Alembert et le De rerum natura

    Rev. Mét. Mor.

    (2002)
  • P. Godfrey-Smith

    Three kinds of adaptationism

  • J.W. Goethe

    Diderots Versuch über die Malerei

  • J.W. Goethe

    Écrits sur l'art

    (1996)
  • K. Goldstein

    The Organism: a Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man (original publication 1934)

    (1995)
  • S. Gould et al.

    The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme

    Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci.

    (1979)
  • B.P.-H.T. D'Holbach

    Système de la Nature ou des lois du monde physique et du monde moral (original publication 1770)

  • G.W.F. Hegel

    Phenomenology of Spirit

    (1807/1979)
  • D. Hull

    Philosophy and biology

  • J. Huxley

    Memories

    (1971)
  • H. Jonas

    Is god a mathematician? The meaning of metabolism

  • M. Kimura

    The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution

    (1983)
  • Cited by (6)

    View full text