a) Holist Versus Reductionist Accounts

Evolutionary biology presents another domain for the debate between reductionism and holism. ii) Methodology As Barbour, Ernst Mayr and others stress, methodological reductionism has been fruitful in molecular biology, but other methodologies such as population genetics and ecology are needed to deal with organisms as a whole.ii) Epistemology. As Francisco Ayala points out,there are biological functions and concepts which cannot be defined in purely chemical and physical terms; they include fitness, adaptation, predator, organ, heterozygosity, and sexuality. For Mayr,evolutionary biology is best treated as historical narrative. Anti-reductionist views such as these in biology fit nicely in the broader epistemic hierarchies developed by Peacocke, Murphy and Ellis.iii) Ontology. Reductive materialism is frequently championed as the only alternative to vitalism, but there are other options. Barbour, for example, supports a holist philosophy of organicism drawn from Whiteheadian metaphysics in which the capacity for experience is ubiquitous in nature (i.e., panexperientialism). By envisioning the ecosystem as a whole, with its many interwoven ecological communities, rather than individual organisms in nature, as the primary context of ecological ethics, Holmes Rolston suggests a holist ontology as well. Other holist ontologies include Murphy’s emergentist monism (nonreductive physicalism) and what I call ontological emergence (see Part 1, D and E, above).

Contributed by: Dr. Robert Russell