The Systems View of Life

The emerging new scientific conception of life, which we summarized in our Preface, can be seen as part of a broader paradigm shift from a mechanistic to a holistic and ecological worldview. At its very core we find a shift of metaphors that is now becoming ever more apparent, as discussed by Capra (2002) – a change from seeing the world as a machi

First, it involves the systematic observation of the phenomena being studied and the recording of these observations as evidence, or scientific data.

the Cartesian division, the humanities concentrating on the res cogitans and the natural sciences on the res extensa.

Twentieth-century science has shown repeatedly that all natural phenomena are ultimately interconnected, and that their essential properties, in fact, derive from their relationships to other things. Hence, in order to explain any one of them completely, we would have to understand all the others, and that is obviously impossible.

This implies that one should be able to understand all aspects of complex structures – plants, animals, or the human body – by reducing them to their smallest constituent parts. This philosophical position is known as Cartesian reductionism.

Before Newton there had been two opposing trends in seventeenth-century science; the empirical, inductive method represented by Bacon and the rational, deductive method represented by Descartes. In the Principia, Newton introduced the proper mixture of both methods, emphasizing that neither experiments without systematic interpretation nor deductio

the ultimate reality, which underlies and unifies the multiple phenomena we observe, is intrinsically dynamic. They called it Tao – the way, or process, of the universe.

Descartes’ cogito, as it has come to be called, made mind more certain for him than matter and led him to the conclusion that the two were separate and fundamentally different. The Cartesian division between mind and matter has had a profound effect on Western thought. It has taught us to be aware of ourselves as isolated egos existing “inside” our

The fallacy of the reductionist view lies in the fact that, while there is nothing wrong in saying that the structures of all living organisms are composed of smaller parts, and ultimately of molecules, this does not imply that their properties can be explained in terms of molecules alone.

Next, scientists attempt to interconnect the data in a coherent way, free of internal contradictions. The resulting representation is known as a scientific model.