Heroes Not Zombies

Relationships – here’s the key to understanding living organisms.

We don’t understand a human being by measuring his or her parts and adding up the results. We understand a human being by studying how the parts relate, and how the person relates to the rest of Nature.

Fritjof Capra puts it this way –

Systems thinking emerged from a series of interdisciplinary dialogues among biologists, psychologists, and ecologists, in the 1920s and ’30s. In all these fields, scientists realized that a living system – organism, ecosystem, or social system – is an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. The “systemic” properties are properties of the whole, which none of its parts have. So, systems thinking involves a shift of perspective from the parts to the whole. The early systems thinkers coined the phrase, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.” What exactly does this mean? In what sense is the whole more than the sum of its parts? The answer is: relationships. All the essential properties of a living system depend on the relationships among the system’s components. Systems thinking means thinking in terms of relationships. Understanding life requires a shift of focus from objects to relationships.

I find this completely thrilling and it explains so clearly why we can’t use reductionism to fully comprehend living beings.