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Holism in science, or holistic science, is an approach to research that emphasizes the study of complex systems. Systems are approached as coherent wholes whose component parts are best understood in context and in relation to one another and to the whole. This practice is in contrast to a purely analytic tradition (sometimes called reductionism) which aims to gain understanding of systems by dividing them into smaller composing elements and gaining understanding of the system through understanding their elemental properties.^[1] The holism-reductionism dichotomy is often evident in conflicting interpretations of experimental findings and in setting priorities for future research.

Overview

David Deutsch calls holism anti-reductionist and refers to the concept as thinking the only legitimate way to think about science is as a series of emergent, or higher level phenomena. He argues that neither approach is purely correct.^[2]

Two aspects of Holism are:

The way of doing science, sometimes called "whole to parts", which focuses on observation of the specimen within its ecosystem first before breaking down to study any part of the specimen.^[3]
The idea that the scientist is not a passive observer of an external universe but rather a participant in the system.^[4]

Holistic science is naturally suited to subjects such as ecology, biology, physics and the social sciences, where complex, non-linear interactions are the norm. These are systems where emergent properties arise at the level of the whole that cannot be predicted by focusing on the parts alone, which may make mainstream, reductionist science ill-equipped to provide understanding beyond a certain level. This principle of emergence in complex systems is often captured in the phrase ′the whole is greater than the sum of its parts′. Living organisms are an example: no knowledge of all the chemical and physical properties of matter can explain or predict the functioning of living organisms. The same happens in complex social human systems, where detailed understanding of individual behaviour cannot predict the behaviour of the group, which emerges at the level of the collective. The phenomenon of emergence may impose a theoretical limit on knowledge available through reductionist methodology, arguably making complex systems natural subjects for holistic approaches.^[5]

Science journalist John Horgan has expressed this view in the book The End of Science. He wrote that a certain pervasive model within holistic science, self-organized criticality, for example, "is not really a theory at all. Like punctuated equilibrium, self-organized criticality is merely a description, one of many, of the random fluctuations, the noise, permeating nature." By the theorists' own admissions, he said, such a model "can generate neither specific predictions about nature nor meaningful insights. What good is it, then?"^[6]

One of the reasons that holistic science attracts supporters is that it seems to offer a progressive, 'socio-ecological' view of the world, but Alan Marshall's book The Unity of Nature offers evidence to the contrary; suggesting holism in science is not 'ecological' or 'socially-responsive' at all, but regressive and repressive.^[1]

Examples in various fields of science

Physical science

Agriculture

Permaculture takes a systems level approach to agriculture and land management by attempting to copy what happens in the natural world.^[7] Holistic management), integrates ecology and social sciences with food production. It was originally designed as a way to reverse desertification.^[8] Organic farming is sometimes considered a holistic approach.^[9]

In physics

Richard Healey offered a modal interpretation and used it to present a model account of the puzzling correlations which portrays them as resulting from the operation of a process that violates both spatial and spatiotemporal separability. He argued that, on this interpretation, the nonseparability of the process is a consequence of physical property holism; and that the resulting account yields genuine understanding of how the correlations come about without any violation of relativity theory or Local Action.^[10] Subsequent work by Clifton, Dickson and Myrvold cast doubt on whether the account can be squared with relativity theory’s requirement of Lorentz invariance but leaves no doubt of an spatially entangled holism in the theory.^[11]^[12] Paul Davies and John Gribbin further observe that Wheeler's delayed choice experiment shows how the quantum world displays a sort of holism in time as well as space.^[13]

In the holistic approach of David Bohm, any collection of quantum objects constitutes an indivisible whole within an implicate and explicate order.^[14]^[15] Bohm said there is no scientific evidence to support the dominant view that the universe consists of a huge, finite number of minute particles, and offered in its stead a view of undivided wholeness: "ultimately, the entire universe (with all its 'particles', including those constituting human beings, their laboratories, observing instruments, etc.) has to be understood as a single undivided whole, in which analysis into separately and independently existent parts has no fundamental status".^[16]

Chaos and complexity

In the latter half of the 20th century, holism led to systems thinking and its derivatives. Systems in biology, psychology, or sociology are frequently so complex that their behavior is, or appears, "new" or "emergent": it cannot be deduced from the properties of the elements alone.^[17] Holism has thus been used as a catchword. This contributed to the resistance encountered by the scientific interpretation of holism, which insists that there are ontological reasons that prevent reductive models in principle from providing efficient algorithms for prediction of system behavior in certain classes of systems.^[18]

Scientific holism holds that the behavior of a system cannot be perfectly predicted, no matter how much data is available. Natural systems can produce surprisingly unexpected behavior, and it is suspected that behavior of such systems might be computationally irreducible, which means it would not be possible to even approximate the system state without a full simulation of all the events occurring in the system. Key properties of the higher level behavior of certain classes of systems may be mediated by rare "surprises" in the behavior of their elements due to the principle of interconnectivity, thus evading predictions except by brute force simulation.^[19]

Ecology

John Muir, a Scottish born early American conservationist, wrote "When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe".^[20] As such, holistic thinking is often applied to ecology, combining biological, chemical, physical, economic, ethical, and political insights. The complexity grows with the area, so that it is necessary to reduce the characteristic of the view in other ways, for example to a specific time of duration.^[21]

Skeptical reception

According to skeptics, the phrase "holistic science" is often misused by pseudosciences. In the book Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology it's noted that "Proponents of pseudoscientific claims, especially in organic medicine, and mental health, often resort to the "mantra of holism" to explain away negative findings. When invoking the mantra, they typically maintain that scientific claims can be evaluated only within the context of broader claims and therefore cannot be evaluated in isolation."^[22] This is an invocation of Karl Popper's demarcation problem and in a posting to Ask a Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci clarifies Popper by positing, "Instead of thinking of science as making progress by inductive generalization (which doesn’t work because no matter how many times a given theory may have been confirmed thus far, it is always possible that new, contrary, data will emerge tomorrow), we should say that science makes progress by conclusively disconfirming theories that are, in fact, wrong."^[23]

Victor J. Stenger states that "holistic healing is associated with the rejection of classical, Newtonian physics. Yet, holistic healing retains many ideas from eighteenth and nineteenth century physics. Its proponents are blissfully unaware that these ideas, especially superluminal holism, have been rejected by modern physics as well".^[24]

Some quantum mystics interpret the wave function of quantum mechanics as a vibration in a holistic ether that pervades the universe and wave function collapse as the result of some cosmic consciousness. This is a misinterpretation of the effects of quantum entanglement as a violation of relativistic causality and quantum field theory.^[25]

Degree programs

Schumacher College in the UK, offers an MSc degree program in Holistic Science

References

^ ^a ^b Marshall Alan (4 October 2002). Unity Of Nature, The: Wholeness And Disintegration In Ecology And Science. World Scientific. ISBN 978-1-78326-116-1.
^ David Deutsch (14 April 2011). The Fabric of Reality. Penguin Books Limited. ISBN 978-0-14-196961-9.
^ Winther, Rasmus Grønfeldt (29 September 2009). "Part-whole science". Synthese. 178 (3). Springer Nature: 397–427. doi:10.1007/s11229-009-9647-0. ISSN 0039-7857.
^ Andres Moreira-Munoz (19 January 2011). Plant Geography of Chile. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 283. ISBN 978-90-481-8748-5.
^ Stephan Harding (15 September 2006). Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, and Gaia. Chelsea Green Publishing. ISBN 978-1-60358-149-3.
^ John Horgan (14 April 2015). The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. Basic Books. p. 128. ISBN 978-0-465-05085-7.
^ Paull , John (2011) The making of an agricultural classic: Farmers of Forty Centuries or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan, 1911-2011, Agricultural Sciences, 2 (3), pp. 175-180.
^ Coughlin, Chrissy. "Allan Savory: How livestock can protect the land". GreenBiz. Retrieved 5 April 2013.
^ Babita; Ahmed, Naseer; Manish, Thakur (November 2016). "ORGANIC FARMING: A HOLISTIC APPROACH TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE FRUIT PRODUCTION". EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHARMACEUTICAL AND MEDICAL RESEARCH. 2 (2): 108–115. Retrieved 29 June 2018.
^ Richard Healey (25 January 1991). The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics: An Interactive Interpretation. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-40874-5.
^ Dennis Dieks; Pieter E. Vermaas (6 December 2012). The Modal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Springer Science & Business Media. pp. 9–44. ISBN 978-94-011-5084-2.
^ Myrvold, Wayne C. (2002). "Modal Interpretations and Relativity". Foundations of Physics. 32 (11). Springer Nature: 1773–1784. doi:10.1023/a:1021406924313. ISSN 0015-9018.
^ Paul Davies; John Gribbin (23 October 2007). The Matter Myth: Dramatic Discoveries that Challenge Our Understanding of Physical Reality. Simon and Schuster. p. 283. ISBN 978-0-7432-9091-3.
^ Richard Healey: Holism and Nonseparability in Physics (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), first published July 22, 1999; substantive revision December 10, 2008, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Section: "Ontological Holism in Quantum Mechanics?" (retrieved June 3, 2011)
^ David Bohm; Basil J. Hiley (16 January 2006). The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-80713-0.
^ David Bohm (12 July 2005). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge. p. 221. ISBN 978-1-134-43872-3.
^ Ion Georgiou (11 January 2013). Thinking Through Systems Thinking. Routledge. p. 50. ISBN 978-1-136-01638-7.
^ Context. PediaPress. p. 130. GGKEY:A1QP852ZJ8E.
^ Gatherer, Derek (2010). "So what do we really mean when we say that systems biology is holistic?". BMC Systems Biology. 4 (1). Springer Nature: 22. doi:10.1186/1752-0509-4-22. ISSN 1752-0509.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
^ Terry Gifford (25 January 2010). Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-3665-7.
^ Rick C. Looijen (6 December 2012). Holism and Reductionism in Biology and Ecology: The Mutual Dependence of Higher and Lower Level Research Programmes. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-94-015-9560-5.
^ Scott O. Lilienfeld; Steven Jay Lynn; Jeffrey M. Lohr (12 October 2014). Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology, Second Edition. Guilford Publications. ISBN 978-1-4625-1751-0.
^ Pigliucci, Massimo. "Demarcating science from pseudoscience". askaphilosopher.wordpress.com. Retrieved 27 June 2018.
^ Victor J. Stenger (2003). Has Science Found God?: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe. Prometheus Books, Publishers. p. 274. ISBN 978-1-61592-158-4.
^ Park, Robert L. (October 1997). "Alternative Medicine and the Laws of Physics". Skeptical Inquirer. 21 (5). Retrieved 28 June 2018.

@@ Line 38: / Line 38: @@
 Scientific holism holds that the behavior of a system cannot be perfectly predicted, no matter how much data is available. Natural systems can produce surprisingly unexpected behavior, and it is suspected that behavior of such systems might be [[computational irreducibility|computationally irreducible]], which means it would not be possible to even approximate the system state without a full simulation of all the events occurring in the system. Key properties of the higher level behavior of certain classes of systems may be mediated by rare "surprises" in the behavior of their elements due to the principle of interconnectivity, thus evading predictions except by brute force simulation.<ref name="Gatherer 2010 p=22">{{cite journal | last=Gatherer | first=Derek | title=So what do we really mean when we say that systems biology is holistic? | journal=BMC Systems Biology | publisher=Springer Nature | volume=4 | issue=1 | year=2010 | issn=1752-0509 | doi=10.1186/1752-0509-4-22 | page=22}}</ref>
+==== Ecology ====
+{{See also|Holistic community|Ecology}}
+[[John Muir]], a Scottish born early American conservationist, wrote "When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe".<ref name="Gifford2010">{{cite book|author=Terry Gifford|title=Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8WaK56qGVYIC|date=25 January 2010|publisher=University of Georgia Press|isbn=978-0-8203-3665-7}}</ref> As such, holistic thinking is often applied to ecology, combining biological, chemical, physical, economic, ethical, and political insights. The complexity grows with the area, so that it is necessary to reduce the characteristic of the view in other ways, for example to a specific time of duration.<ref name="Looijen2012">{{cite book|author=Rick C. Looijen|title=Holism and Reductionism in Biology and Ecology: The Mutual Dependence of Higher and Lower Level Research Programmes|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=B03qCAAAQBAJ&pg=PR7|date=6 December 2012|publisher=Springer Science & Business Media|isbn=978-94-015-9560-5}}</ref>
 == Skeptical reception ==

v t e Philosophy of biology
Themes	Empiricism Naturalism Pragmatism Reductionism Holism Emergence Evolutionary taxonomy
Evolution	Adaptationism Alternatives to Darwinian evolution Catastrophism Lamarckism Orthogenesis Mutationism Structuralism Spandrel Theistic Vitalism Darwinism Evolutionary epistemology Teleology Tree of life
Philosophers of biology	John Beatty Lindley Darden Daniel Dennett John Dupré Carla Fehr Marjorie Grene Peter Godfrey-Smith James R. Griesemer Paul E. Griffiths David Hull Hans Jonas Philip Kitcher Tim Lewens Helen Longino Jane Maienschein Roberta Millstein Sandra Mitchell Susan Oyama Alex Rosenberg Michael Ruse Sahotra Sarkar Elliott Sober Kim Sterelny Alfred I. Tauber Francisco Varela Gerard Verschuuren William C. Wimsatt
Biologists	Francisco J. Ayala Patrick Bateson Charles Darwin Richard Dawkins Jared Diamond Michael Ghiselin François Jacob Stephen Jay Gould Richard Lewontin Konrad Lorenz Humberto Maturana Ernst Mayr Jacques Monod Denis Noble Joan Roughgarden Rolf Sattler John Maynard Smith E. O. Wilson Jonas Salk
Related	Philosophy of mind History of biology