for - individual / collective gestalt - gene centrism - paradigm shift - adjacency - mistake of 20th century biology - reductionism - separating organism from environment - individual / collective gestalt, individual / environment gestalt - quote - mistake of 20th century biology - Ray Noble - key insight - mistake of 20th century biology- Ray Noble

quote - mistake of 20th century biology - Ray Noble - (see below)

• I think one of the other mistakes that have been made in biology of the 20th century
  • was to treat organisms as if they existed within an environment that was sort of like some nebulous box as it were
  • and you could study the organism by taking it out
  • and you study it in isolation
• It's the beginning of reductionism in a sense because
  • you taken it away from the environment but the organism has an intimate relationship with the environment
• It's feeding both
  • to the environment and
  • from the environment
• What is that environment?
  • That environment in large part is
    • other organisms of the same species but
    • other organisms of different species
• and it's in a continuous bubble of change
• It's like a cauldron of change
• So the big question for life is
  • how do you maintain yourself in this cauldron of change?
• You cannot do it by standing still
• You have to respond to it
  • so it's not surprising therefore that you find that you know organisms have mechanisms for responding to those changes

adjacency - mistake of 20th century biology - between - reductionism - separating organism from environment - individual / collective gestalt, - individual / environment gestalt - adjacency relationship - The mistake that 20th century biology has made is in - ascribing too much power to the gene, and - minimizing the role of epigenetics - Focusing the majority of attention and resources on the genes of the organism, and - defocusing attention on the organisms (epigenetic) interactions with the environment, including both - biotic elements and - abiotic elements - It's not the case that the genes are the major determinant factor and the epigenetics play a minor role - It IS the case that epigenetics play an equally important role in transmitting and assimilating features into the genome - The individual organism is intertwingled with its environment and with other living organisms - The individual / collective gestalt and the individual / environment gestalt is the appropriate unit of study

for - quote - reductionism has failed - Denis Noble

• quote -“If you can’t read or understand the ‘peer-reviewed science’ then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people - drawn, as all green ‘thought leaders’ are, from the upper strata of society - will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen.”

• comment

  • The problem can be extrapolated into language itself
  • Any word is just an abstraction and oversimplifies a complex reality
  • if we generalize this argument, it leads to the general claim that
    • abstraction leads to harmful conclusions as well