There has long existed a type of person who has tried to explain phenomena through reductionism. Reductionism means basically attempts to explain things by using "nothing but" explanations. Reductionists make all kinds of boastful, untrue claims about the levels of success of reductionist explanations. But the truth is that almost nothing has been explained by reductionist explanations. In human history there have been only three great successes of reductionism: the explanation of wind, heat and lightning.
For a long time scientists wondered about the nature of heat. Many postulated that heat was some kind of substance that somehow flowed into things that got hot. They called such a substance caloric. Scientists for a while thought that maybe when something got really cold, it was because that thing had somehow lost some of its caloric substance, and that things got hotter when they gained some caloric substance. We now know this idea is false. Things don't get hotter because they are gaining a caloric substance.
We now have an explanation for heat, and it's an incredibly simple explanation. Heat is simply how fast the molecules in something are moving. For example, when your coffee is hot, it's simply that the molecules inside your coffee are moving around faster than when your coffee is cold. When you heat something up, you are not adding any substance called caloric; you are simply making the molecules in something move around faster.
Another great triumph of reductionist explanation was the explanation of wind. To the ancient thinker, wind might have seemed very mysterious. We can imagine him asking: why is it windy on some days, and calm on other days; and are windstorms the wrath of the gods? Now we understand that wind is very simple. Wind is nothing but the flow between differences in air pressure. Whenever there is some region of the air which has greater air pressure, near some other region of the air that has lower air pressure, wind will tend to flow from the region of higher air pressure to the region of lower air pressure. That's all wind is: flows from regions of higher air pressure to regions of lower air pressure. Because it's so simple, a weatherman can reliably predict how much wind there will be, just by looking at a map showing air pressure differences. If there's big differences, there will be lots of wind; and if there's no big differences, there will be very little or no wind. For example, a weatherman looking at the map below will know that the low pressure area (marked by L) will be getting a strong wind coming from the high pressure area above it (marked by H).
Then there was the explanation of lightning, which was another successful reductionist explanation rather similar to the explanation of wind. Lightning is simply the very rapid flow of electrical charge from one area with a much higher electrical charge to another area with a much lower electrical charge. Just as wind tends to flow from regions of higher air pressure to regions of lower air pressure, electrical charge will tend to flow from one region of higher electrical charge to a nearby region of lower electrical charge. Lightning is simply electricity or electrical charge jumping spontaneously from a part of the sky with much higher electrical charge to some part of the sky (or the ground) with much lower electrical charge.
Such explanations of nature had been completed by the year 1850. By about this time, there started to arise a group of thinkers with great explanatory greed, who hoped that the biggest mysteries of life and mind could be explained with simple "it's nothing but" reductionist explanations. We can call this type of thinkers "the nothing butters," because of their love of reductionist "it's nothing but" explanations.
The nothing-butters tried to claim that more and more of nature was being explained by reductionist "it's nothing but" explanations, and they attempted to cite the success of Newtonian gravity theory as one of the triumphs of reductionist explanation. Citing Newton was not justified, because Newton's explanation of planetary motions was not really a reductionist explanation. Newton found it necessary to postulate a universal force of gravitational attraction acting between all massive bodies in the universe. Such a reality isn't something simple, but something quite complicated. According to the original Newtonian theory, to correctly calculate the gravitational force acting on any astronomical body (call it body X), you must know the masses of all astronomical bodies in the solar system, even objects billions of miles away. And you must also know the distances between all such bodies and body X, and also must know a hard-to-determine thing called the universal gravitational constant, and must also use a particular formula involving squaring the distances between objects. Newton's theory of gravity was never really a "it's nothing but" reductionist theory, and its Einstein revision makes it even more complex.
The nothing-butters claimed early versions of the atomic theory as a triumph of reductionism. "We're nothing but bunches of simple atoms," they began to chant. But it turned out the early versions of atomic theory advanced by people like John Dalton were not correct. The main building blocks of humans are not atoms, but much more complex things such as protein molecules consisting of thousands of atoms arranged in a very special way, and cells consisting of millions of protein molecules arranged in a very special way. Once humans found out the details of atoms, they found that atoms are not simple indivisible particles as imagined by thinkers such as Dalton, but instead usually units composed of many individual proton, neutron and electron parts. In additional, there were special fine-tuned forces needed for atoms to exist, such as the strong nuclear force and Coulomb's law. The details of atoms and nuclear physics are so complicated that what we know about atoms cannot be counted as any success of reductionist nothing-butters.
Earthquakes have been explained, but not by any simple "it's nothing but" explanation. The theory that explains earthquakes is a very complicated theory called plate tectonics. For a long time reductionists tried to persuade us that sunlight occurs for the simple reason that Earth has a nearby sun that is "just a big ball of hot gas." We now know that sunlight occurs not by some simple radiation of a hot gas, but from the complicated process of thermonuclear fusion, which involves some deep complexities of nuclear physics.
Once cells were discovered, biologists tried to cite cells as an example of reductionist success. "We're nothing but bags of simple cells," cried the nothing-butters, who tried to depict cells as real simple things. We now know the folly of such ideas. It turns out that cells are fantastically complex structures so organized and rich in diverse functions that they have been compared to small factories. We now know that cells are made from very complex components called organelles, which are themselves made of extremely complex components called protein complexes, which themselves are made of proteins that each typically have hundreds of well-arranged amino acid parts. There is nothing simple about cells or their components.
But the nothing-butters kept trying their best to claim explanatory success beyond their successes in explaining wind, heat and lightning. The nothing-butters built one of their biggest legends when they tried to claim the origin of species such as the human species had been explained in a "it was nothing but" way. "We get new species from nothing but random variations" the nothing-butters began chanting. The more we learned about all the vast levels of hierarchical organization, very precise fine-tuning, coded information and extremely coordinated functional complexity in living things, the less credible this claim sounded. But this claim that humans are just accumulations of random variations still lives and thrives, because a massive belief community has arisen around it, and the claim is enthusiastically taught by a priesthood of evolutionary biologists who are pillars of a church-like believer community within the halls of academia.
The nothing-butters also tried to explain the human mind in a "it's nothing but" way. They tried to do this by arguing that all human mental activity is nothing but brain activity. Although very widely held, the idea that the mind is merely the brain is untenable for a host of reasons well-explained at the site here. Among the endless questions that cannot be answered by those claiming your mind is just brain activity (from a brain that arose by mere natural selection) are the questions below:
Because none of these questions has been credibly answered in a way compatible with "the mind is just brain activity" claim, such a claim has no credibility. Explaining mind activity as just being brain activity is merely a speech custom of reductionists, not something that we should count as an accomplishment of reductionism. But what about explanations of infectious disease as being caused by microbes? Even the simplest living bacteria is a very complicated thing, and the interaction of microbes and the human immune system (a fantastically complicated body system) is an extremely complicated story. So we can't count explaining infectious disease as any great triumph of reductionism. The full story of what goes on in your body when you get an infectious disease ends up being a story that would take many times longer to explain than an explanation of your symptoms, so there is no "it's nothing but..." triumph here.
One of the greatest problems of biology is explaining human development, the mystery of how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to become the enormously more organized reality of the human body. Before the discovery of DNA, the nothing-butters tried to explain this enormously impressive reality by various ridiculous sound bites such as the claim that the appearance of a human body is "nothing but growth" or "nothing but unfolding" or some such slogan. After DNA was discovered, the nothing-butters started telling a huge lie that they kept telling for many decades: the lie that the appearance of a human body was nothing but the reading of instructions stored in DNA. We now know that DNA has no instructions for building a human body, no instructions for making any human organ, and no instructions for making any of the 200 types of cells in the human body. Clear off from the table all the lies told about genes, genomes and DNA, and we find that the progression from a speck-sized human zygote to a full human body is a miracle of progression and organization utterly beyond the explanation of reductionists, something vastly more impressive than a hundred symmetrical car-sized sandcastles arising on a beach where there is no sand castle builder we can see.
We can now see that in its long history reductionism has had only three major successes: the explanation of wind, the explanation of heat and the explanation of lightning. How has reductionism managed to retain its prestige in the halls of academia despite so little success? Because of reasons such as these:
- Reductionists have often practiced pareidolia in which they reported seeing things that they were eagerly hoping to see, things which were not well-supported by evidence. They were helped by loose evidence standards in which a result expected by chance 1 time in 20 is considered a "statistically significant" result good enough for science journal publication. As a result, if 100 scientists look for something not there, each doing 10 experiments, then 50 of them will be able to publish "statistically significant" evidence for the thing that's not there.
- Reductionists often work in fields where poor research practices prevail, such as experimental neuroscience which these days is dominated by Questionable Research Practices such as using inadequate study group sizes.
- Reductionists have mastered a large variety of "shrink speaking" word tricks that try to make things of vast complexity or oceanic depth sound like things very simple. These included the tricks of referring to human mental phenomena (a topic of oceanic depth) using the diminutive term "consciousness," and the trick of referring to biological innovations (often involving huge leaps of hierarchical organization and great leaps of functional information) using diminutive terms such as "variations" or "diversification."
- Keeping themselves in a filter bubble, reductionists practice various forms of evidence ignoring in which they pay no attention to fields of study such as parapsychology, and pay no attention to case histories that defy their dogmas.
- Reductionists have given us mountains of lies and misleading statements, such as claims or insinuations that DNA is an anatomy blueprint. Dozens of these lies and misleading statements are listed in my post here. An example of what I refer to in this paragraph is Jacques Monod's bible of reductionism Chance and Necessity, which another book calls "a morass of undefined terms, contradictory statements and misleading rhetoric." For example, referring to a molecule (DNA) that does not at all specify anatomy, behavior or instincts, the book told us the huge lie that DNA is an alphabet specifying "all the diversity of structures and performances the biosphere contains."
The only major things that were ever successfully explained by reductionists are wind, heat and lightning, which were three very simple things. Our reductionists should have learned a lesson from this: that only very simple things can be explained by "it is nothing but..." explanations. Utterly failing to learn this lesson, the nothing-butters have kept trying to explain the most enormously complex things with their simplistic "it's nothing but" explanations. The more we learn about the complexity and mystifying intricacies of such things, the more absurd such reductionist explanation attempts sound.
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