a) <!g>Holist Versus Reductionist Accounts

<!g>Evolutionary biology presents another domain for the debate between reductionism and holism. ii) Methodology As <!g>Barbour, Ernst Mayr and others stress, methodological reductionism has been fruitful in molecular biology, but other methodologies such as population <!g>genetics and ecology are needed to deal with organisms as a whole.ii) <!g>Epistemology. As <!g>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 <!g>Peacocke, Murphy and <!g>Ellis.iii) <!g>Ontology. Reductive <!g>materialism is frequently championed as the only alternative to <!g>vitalism, but there are other options. Barbour, for example, supports a holist philosophy of organicism drawn from Whiteheadian <!g>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, <!g>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: <!g>Dr. Robert Russell