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.

According to the systems view, an organism, or living system, is an integrated whole whose essential properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts. They arise from the interactions and relationships between the parts.

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.

as Arne Naess clearly recognized: Care flows naturally if the “self” is widened and deepened so that protection of free Nature is felt and conceived as protection of ourselves…Just as we need no morals to make us breathe…[so] if your “self” in the wide sense embraces another being, you need no moral exhortation to show care…You

The philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) used the German word Gestalt, meaning “organic form,” to describe an irreducible perceptual pattern, which sparked the school of Gestalt psychology. To characterize a Gestalt, Ehrenfels coined the celebrated phrase, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts,” which would become the catchphrase

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

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.

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

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