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In Praise of Reductionism

Brian Goodwin

Indigenous science and technology can result in effective, sustainable agriculture that is more productive (measured as return per unit of investment) than intensive, chemical-based or 'scientific' modern methods which are not sustainable. This effectiveness of indigenous methods of acquiring knowledge and applying it is partly due to the integrated context-sensitive nature of traditional knowledge systems. However, they fail to provide what are regarded in modern science as explanations of natural phenomena. The analytical tradition uses a powerful method of revealing levels of process beneath phenomena and giving explanations of them, but it frequently fails to result in an understanding of integrated, coherent wholes. Ways of achieving this by scientific methods that go beyond analysis will be examined.

Professor Brian Goodwin was born in Canada in 1931. He studied biology at McGill University, mathematics at Oxford, and received a PhD from Edinburgh University in 1960. After research appointments at McGill and MIT, he became a Reader in Biology at the University of Sussex, then Professor of Biology at the Open University. He is now a Scholar in Residence at Schumacher College. His research and teaching interests are on the uses of the sciences of complexity to study emergent phenomena and to understand health in various contexts. This involves a fundamental rethinking of basic scientific and biological assumptions and leads to a new science of qualities.

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