Heroes Not Zombies

I’m reading Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” (and, oh, how I’m enjoying it!). Quite early in the book he says this –

….in the words of the physicist Philip Anderson, that “more is different”. Writing in Science magazine in 1972, Anderson noted that aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behaviour that cannot be predicted by observing the component parts. Chemistry isn’t just applied physics – you cannot understand all the properties of water from studying its constituent atoms in isolation.

How true! And imagine how that applies even more so to the complexity of biological organisms. You really cannot understand a human being by only studying his or her component parts. One day, health care will catch up with that simple insight!