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Quotations from the Web of Life: Chapter Two "From the parts to the whole"

The basic tension is one between the parts and the whole. The emphasis on the parts has been mechanistic, reductionist, or atomistic; the emphasis on the whole, holistic, organistic, or ecological.

OK, I suppose an example of parts and whole would be cell organelles (like nucleus, cell membrane, endoplasmic reticulum etc) and cells or protons, electrons etc and atoms but the problem with this is: in order to be scientifically meaningful a relationship needs to be testable experimentally: I need a definition which conveys the essence of the part/whole relationship and clearly shows what a part and a whole are in a relationship - in any given situation how do you say what is a part and what a whole - so you say that parts are a set of variables bundled together in some way statistically related to how the whole behaves - how in fact do you define something as a part if it has no statistically meaningful relationship to what you have called a whole? What is it about a whole that makes it a whole and not just another part?

Just thinking about this, maybe you can say that a variable quantifies a property of a whole relative to variables associated with parts if there are two kinds of statistical relationship between entities - one part to part and the other part to whole, so that those regarded as wholes have a particular relationship to other wholes which their component parts do not have. In some way the concept of necessary and sufficient conditions seems relevant to this - I'm sure necessary and sufficient conditions can be expressed statistically. I have had one or two encounters with the theory of database design in the past, and although it is blurred in my memory in some way the concept of database normalisation seems relevant - database normalisation has to do with how you associate different entities in a logical structure.

The tension between mechanism and holism has been a recurring theme throughout the history of biology. It is an inevitable consequence of the ancient dichotomy between substance (matter, structure, quantity) and form (pattern, order, quality) Biological form is more than shape, more than a static configuration of components in a whole.

form = pattern of relationships in an organised whole

In his "Critique of Judgement", Kant discussed the nature of living organisms. He argued that organisms, in contrast to machines, are self-organising wholes. In a machine, according to Kant, the parts only exist for each other, in the sense of supporting each other within a functional whole. In an organism, the parts also exist by means of each other, in the sense of producing each other. "We must think of each part as an organ", wrote Kant, "that produces the other parts (so that each reciprocally produces the other). Because of this [the organism] will be both an organised ans self-organising being."

Ross Harrison identified configuration and relationship as two major aspects of organisation, which were subsequently unified in the concept of pattern as a configuration of ordered relationships.

If you substitute "configuration of ordered relationships" for "pattern" in the statement two above, you get "form = the configuration of ordered relationships of relationships in an organised whole." Do you see what I mean about the slipshod use of language and interchangibility of terms leading to confusion. OK, if I wasn't being picky I guess I could say "form = configuration of relationships in an organised whole." But really, it just seems a lot of words where the relationship to data is quite tenuous.

A system has come to mean an integrated whole whose essential properties derive from the relationships between its parts.

This statement "essential properties derive from" - surely "derive from" means cause - in which case it should be testable and in which case the parts do derive the whole - so reductionism is valid

At each level of complexity, the observed phenomena exhibit properties that do not exist at the lower level. For example, the concept of temperature, which is central to thermodynamics, is meaningless at the atomic level.

According to the systems view, the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships between the parts

Systems cannot be understood by analysis. The properties of the parts are not intrinsic properties, but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole.

Chapter Three "Systems Theories"

Living systems are integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. Their essential or systemic properties are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the organising relations of the parts, i.e. from a configuration of ordered relationships that is characteristic of that particular class of organisms, or systems

I dunno about this. Integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to the parts but whose essential or systemic properties arise from the organising relations of the parts - what does this mean? It's all so abstract - examples of what he is talking about would make things clearer - OK - there are examples later in the book, but the distance from this stuff to the examples is long

Another key criterion of systems thinking is the ability to shift one's attention back and forth between systems levels. Throughout the living world, we find systems nesting within other systems, and by applying the same concepts to different systems levels - e.g the concept of stress to an organism, a city, or an economy - we can often gain important insights. On the other hand we also have to recognise that, in general, different systems levels represent levels of differing complexity. At each level the observed phenomena exhibit properties that do not exist at the lower levels. The systemic properties of a particular level are called emergent properties, since they emerge at that level.

Here are some quotations from Chapter two of a related book, which I still haven't got my head around enough to review: "Lifelines" by Professor Steven Rose