© 1988 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Rehabilitating Reductionism1
University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
SYNOPSIS: Reductionism has become the object of a great deal of criticism from a variety of quarters within evolutionary biology in recent years. Many contemporary anti-reductionists argue that reductionism is inappropriate in biological inquiry given the prevalence of hierarchies, scales of complexity and levels of organization in the organic world. They further contend that a commitment to reductionism has led evolutionary theorists to make a large number of methodological blunders and conceptual errors in constructing explanations of biological evolution.
The contemporary critics of reductionism have not made a persuasive case for the ontological peculiarity of the organic world. Much of their argument concerning hierarchy and levels appears to rest on assertion rather than metaphysical necessity or ontological peculiarity. Moreover, the interpretations of reductionism attacked by contemporary critics in biology are narrow and overly simplistic.
The modern synthetic theory of evolution may well have explanatory inadequacies that demand the attention of biologists working in many fields. But attempts to motivate theoretical alternatives to this theory based solely on ontological grounds appear to place the ontological cart before the theoretical horse. Theories dictate ontological commitments and, as a result, it is at the level of theoretical rather than ontological adequacy that the assessment of the modern synthetic theory ought to proceed.