It’s always refreshing to read a book in which an author steeped in science takes on the fallacies of Scientism. After all, the idea that the world can be understood by reducing it to elemental parts is a persistent dogma of science that is rooted in 18th Century thinking. The hubris of shamanic science is the belief that our puny habit of reduction can reveal the “true” nature of the world.
“It Ain’t Necessarily So” is a collection of fascinating book reviews by scientist-author Richard Lewontin, in which he picks apart the hype of reductive science, explaining with a lucid and biting logic how it is often the case that “the emporer has no clothes”.
Underlying each of Lewontin’s essays lies a simple, if somewhat disconcerting, idea. We can cut the bovine system called “cow” up into pieces in an effort to figure out what a cow is, but once we have done so, we no longer have a cow. What’s more, we cannot yet put the pieces back together to remake the cow, a la Frankenstein’s monster, but even if we could reassemble the cow in some Transylvanian laboratory, we would still be no closer to understanding WHY the reassembled cow parts became once again, a “cow”.
Cutting up cows to understand the nature of cows is the central problem of reduction and the principal challenge of systems thinking.
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