[PEN-L] Systems versus reductionism in biological research

[Doyle Saylor]

Greetings Economists,
This link 
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10018596  
has a story on a shift in biological work away from finding the 
smallest units.  To quote

,,,"Actually, the beating heart was no simple video. It was, instead, 
the output of a stupendously complex computer model of a heart, 
developed over more than 40 years. This model is an example of “systems 
biology”, an approach that represents a significant shift both in the 
way biologists think about their field and in how they go about 
investigating it.

A central tenet of most scientific endeavour is the notion of 
reductionism—the idea that things can best be understood by reducing 
them to their smallest components. This turns out to be immensely 
useful in physics and chemistry, because the smallest components coming 
from a particle accelerator or a test tube behave individually in 
predictable ways."...

Doyle,
This reportage I think clarifies the perennial claim that reductionism 
is a 'philosophy' metaphysics and related to mechanical materialism as 
such.   I think it is viewed as technic, not a philosophy in science 
and there is no coherent metaphysics behind it.  A sort of capitalist 
ideology infecting capitalist science it is not.
Doyle