Josh Hutcherson Blue Boxer Briefs Bed

Reductionism / 1

The reductionism is an approach to scientific knowledge by which to explain a system must break them down into its constituent parts, then these elements will be further divided into elementary parts, and so on, until you get to the basic elements of reality.
In particular, according to a reductionist point of view applied to biology:

1. You can not understand any biological phenomenon of the higher level until it analyze the components present in the next lower level, this analytical breakdown should be continued for downlink to the level characterized by purely chemical and physical processes.
2. Such reasoning leads to further claims that the fact of knowing the components of the lower level allows us to reconstruct all higher levels, and provides a comprehensive knowledge of the higher levels. Such a reductionist claims arising from their conviction that every entity in the whole match nothing more than the sum of their parts (1).

opposes the reductionism approach Type holistic, taking into account the interactions among the parts of a system, showing how a complex system properties emerge that are characteristic of the level of description that is considered, and which are not reducible to lower-level items.

(1) E. Mayr, The uniqueness of biology, Cambridge University Press 2005 (2004), p. 74.