Authors: T. Colin Campbell
It was not until the thirteenth century or so that science began to reemerge, thus defining a new era, the Renaissance, that led to a clash between the faith-based and rationalist viewpoints. Scholars rediscovered the writings of the classical Greeks and were inspired to pursue their methods of observation instead of clinging to faith-based conclusions. Copernicus (1473-1543) challenged theological dogma by offering that the sun, not the earth, occupied center stage of our known universe. Galileo (1564-1642) invented the telescope and showed that Copernicus was right.
For the next 300 years (1600-1900), many notable and courageous scholars and scientists made observations that continued to build a foundation for the supremacy of scientific facts over theological faith—at least in the minds of many. Human-based, reasoned observations and thought— humanism—flourished, and it proved itself both enlightening and useful.
But this new humanism, having clawed its way to respectability against a doctrinaire Church, became far less tolerant of theology than its classical Greek ancestor. Rather than seeking partnership with theologians, scientists increasingly sought to distance themselves and their endeavors from “superstitions” not grounded in observable fact. This included not just religion, but any idea that did not adhere to scientific views, in which truth was found only through breaking down the observable world into as many smaller parts as possible. In short: reductionism. Although what we humans can observe has changed and grown over time, that fundamental belief about truth has not. Each new advancement in technology only allows us to break the world into smaller and smaller pieces.
The history of the last 200 years has been the inexorable march of reductionism in all aspects of our lives, from science, to nutrition, to education (think of all the “subjects” taught in isolation from one another), to economics (think of microeconomics versus macroeconomics), and even the human soul (think of how it has been reduced to a map of nerves and networks in the brain).
Looking at our approach to understanding today, it would appear that reductionism, wearing the guise of science, has won—but at great cost to our understanding of the world. In rejecting religious control of science, we also are rejecting the useful perspectives theology offers: a way of looking at the world as a fundamentally connected whole. A willingness to accept that there are things we may not ever be able to fully understand, and instead can only observe.
Mere “scientific” facts cannot fully explain more than a minuscule part of the far-reaching and complex personal emotions we feel when we experience special moments of our lives or stand before the great wonders
of the world. Could facts ever fully explain the inspiration and awe we feel when listening to great music, wondering about the beginning and end of the universe, or admiring other people’s talents and emotions? Could describing an enzyme activity, nerve transmission, or hormonal burst really capture what it is like to experience that admiration or those emotions? These things are unimaginably complex and therefore beyond the tools of objective material inquiry. The Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated through his incompleteness theorem (published in 1931) the futility of using reductionist techniques to model a complex system. He proved mathematically that no complex system could be known in its entirety, and that any system that could be known in its entirety was merely a subset of a larger one. In other words, science can never fully describe the universe. No matter how strong the lens or how powerful the computer, we will never be able to model with complete accuracy the chemical reactions that occur when we do something as simple and mundane as watch a sunset. It’s not just a technical matter of better tools and more computing power. It’s as if reality itself defies the attempt.
At the same time that Gödel was discovering the limits of math to describe numerical reality, particle physicists were realizing that their enhanced tools of perception were inadequate to nail down physical reality as well. Light was either a particle or a wave, depending on how you observed it. Quantum physics dispensed with objectivity altogether, describing subatomic particles in terms of probabilities rather than realities. Werner Heisenberg showed that we could at any moment observe either the position or the speed of an electron, but not both.
Reductionism—in effect, the quest for this kind of full disclosure—is incredibly useful, but the more we learn, the more clear it is that reductionism is insufficient to the task of understanding the universe.
The way we practice science today is the result, then, of a post-Renaissance rejection of a more (w)holistic way of looking at the world along with religion itself. But returning to the pre-Renaissance division of labor between scientists and theologians isn’t the answer either. To
find a useful model for us today—a model of a scientist who deploys reductionist methods within a wholistic framework—we have to go back to the Renaissance itself.
There may be no individual whose accomplishments were more symbolic of the integration of science and wholism than the ultimate Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Da Vinci’s exceptional significance and reputation was not only due to his brilliant talents in art (e.g.,
Mona Lisa, The Last Supper),
but also because he was an exceptional scientist. His interests in science were unusually broad, ranging from the biological (anatomy, zoology, and botany) to the physical (geology, optics, aerodynamics, and hydrodynamics). Da Vinci’s accomplishments were extraordinary even by modern measures, and, lest we forget, they were achieved over 500 years ago!
Da Vinci had a keen interest in the reality and the wonders of nature as a broad and dynamic whole. The subject matter of his inspired paintings was almost more wondrous than reality, reflecting to me, at least, his understanding of what it means to be human—also a very large and dynamic whole. Da Vinci was also deeply curious about the small details that might be able to explain the human-perceived wonders he painted. This can be readily seen both in his drawings of anatomical structures in biology and his refined representations of mechanical structures in physics. He published amazingly detailed drawings of human anatomy, where, as one biographer noted, he paid “attention to the forms of even very small organs, capillaries and hidden parts of the skeleton.” Da Vinci is even credited with being the first in the modern world to introduce the idea of controlled experimentation—the core concept of science—and, for this, he has been considered by some writers to be the Father of Science. Probably more than any other scholastic luminary of that time, he recognized the relationship between the whole and its parts.
Da Vinci was what we call a
polymath
, a term that refers to his exceptional range of artistic, humanistic, and scientific talents. But more relevant than his specific achievements for the purposes of this book is Da Vinci’s scholarship, which advanced and supported a new way of thinking: a synthesis of the whole and its parts. He embraced both breadth and depth of thinking both by paying attention to emerging facts and details as they were made available by science, and by apprehending the rapture
of human emotion when all parts, known and unknown, acted in symphony to become the whole.
Da Vinci’s contributions to our understanding of the universe are profound and enduring precisely because of this integration. He understood that wholism needed reductionism to advance, and reductionism needed wholism to remain relevant. He realized that when you take something out of context to study it more closely or measure it more exactly, you risk losing more wisdom than you gain.
The South African statesman and philosopher Jan Smuts, who is credited with coining the term
holism
(without the “w”), wrote that reality consists of a “great whole” that comprises “small natural center[s] of wholeness.” In my work, the body is the great whole and the process by which the body digests food is a smaller center of wholeness within the body. (Nutrition is one perspective on the wholeness of the body.) You can apply this concept to refer also to a human being as a small center of wholeness within the great whole of the biosphere of planet Earth, or to a single human cell as a great whole, of which the mitochondria, DNA, and other blobs you studied in high school biology are small, natural centers that are also whole unto themselves. In either direction, you can continue as far as observation and then your imagination can take you. From the macrocosmic universe to the microcosmic ones, there is, philosophically speaking, a hierarchy of wholes, with each whole having parts that themselves are wholes.
In this book I will be discussing only a few selected parts of biology: genetic expression, intracellular metabolism, and nutrition. Each of these is, in and of itself, an incomprehensibly complex system. But I am somewhat uncomfortable dividing biology into systems at all, because this infers boundaries that are, in reality, vague and arbitrary. Although an organ in the body certainly has physical boundaries, it still communicates with other organs within the body via nerve transmission and hormonal communication, among other means. Every entity within the body, whether physical or metabolic, is both a whole and a part. We have to divide wholes into their component parts so we can talk about them
effectively, but even as we do so, we need to remain aware that such divisions are somewhat arbitrary.
Indeed, thinking that our classification system is a perfect mapping of reality is a limiting and potentially dangerous stance. For example, Western medicine views the body geographically; it treats the liver, the kidney, the heart, the left patella, and so on. Chinese medicine, by contrast, sees the body as an energetic network. It might diagnose a patient with a Western label of “liver cancer” as suffering from “too much yang in the triple burner meridian”—a description of an energetic imbalance affecting the so-called burning regions of the body, centered around the head, the chest, and the pelvis. When Western doctors first encountered this system, the vast majority of them dismissed the talk of chi energy and meridians as superstition, as opposed to the “objective reality” of organs, bones, fluids, and muscles. But the documented efficacy of acupuncture, which moves energy along meridians to treat many ailments, testifies to the usefulness of the Chinese paradigm.
Some of you may argue that our limited understanding of biology is a failure of technology, not of paradigm—that, sure, the biological system is beyond our ability to comprehend it now, but at some point, we will have a reductionist lens powerful enough to understand even its complexity. To return to our elephant metaphor, we might increase the number of blind men well into the millions, make each one responsible for understanding a microscopic part of the elephant, and then employ advanced computational methods and a massive supercomputer to put it all together. That, in effect, is the thesis of the famed futurist, Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, who imagines our being able to create, from scratch, a human body, once we know all the parts and develop supercomputers sufficiently powerful to enable us to do so.
But I submit that this viewpoint is naïve—at least for biological systems like a whole body. As an example, let’s take the enzyme, a protein that is instrumental to the various chemical reactions necessary for the proper function of the human body, like the digestion of food and the construction of cells. Through experimentation and observation, we can discern the chemical composition, size, shape, and some of the functionality of the enzyme. Is a summation of these things the enzyme? According to modern science, the answer is yes. Modern science sees
the enzyme as a discrete entity, with discernable edges, and its goal is to discern these edges.
If the world was, indeed, an accumulation of parts, each defined by discernable edges, then perhaps at some future point the technologists could understand the human body through a reductionist lens powered by supercomputers, complex computational models, and other technologies. But the world is far more complex than this. The enzyme is not, in fact, a discrete unit that stands alone; it is an
integral
element of a larger system. It exists in service to the system, as does every other element of that system. If an element ever ceases to act in service to its system, as with uncontrolled cancer growth, the system breaks down, and may even fail entirely. Because each part is an integral element of the same system, all the parts are connected to one another; no one part stands alone. And this means each part affects and is affected by the other parts. Removing or modifying a part changes the whole, just as changing the whole, as we will see in later discussions, impacts the parts—that is, when one part is altered, all the other parts are forced to adapt to try and keep the system running.
In this scenario, the discrete boundaries we assign to individual parts melt away. Put simply, there are no fixed “edges” within the human body that separate any one part from all the other parts. In their place are infinite connection and unending change, and it is this continual cascade of causes and effects that renders reductionist prediction models useless.
This lack of boundaries is important because it means that each “part” of the body involves more than what can be seen when the part is viewed, as it is in reductionism, in isolation from the larger system it serves. What the enzyme is made of, what it looks like, what it does, and why it does it—all of this is a function of the larger system that is the human body. Better, more powerful technology doesn’t alter that fundamental reality. No matter how many blind men you employ to observe parts of the elephant, and no matter how much technology is available to support them, you can never generate the understanding required to see the full elephant.
When I lament the idea of taking a part out of context of the whole— whether that part is a nutrient, biological mechanism, or something else—this is what I am lamenting: how, in studying parts out of context,
we blind ourselves to wholistic interpretations as well as the real-life solutions to human health those interpretations would provide.