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Nonetheless, chemistry survives, and is very different from physics, because the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Then I gather you disagree with Prof. Mayr? Ha! That puts us in the same camp, RWP! :^)

jennyp raised this issue of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts the other day using H₂O as an example. Obviously neither hydrogen nor oxygen alone have the properties of water. Water is the result of their chemical bonding. Further, water is still water though it may be in any one of three states -- gaseous, liquid, or solid -- at any particular time, as determined by environmental conditions. Thus water itself is a part of (and its behavior determined by) a greater systemic whole which is greater than the sum of its parts, and which seems to place phenomena (all the parts) together in their mutual relations.

My problem -- and maybe you can help me with this -- is that the chemical laws do not seem up to the job of describing the "greater systemic whole," though they do an excellent job of describing the physical relations obtaining among its parts. IOW, if one says that physico-chemical laws alone specify everything that goes on in the natural world, wouldn't this be tantamount to saying that the whole is completely reducible to the behavior of its parts?

But this would be to say that the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts....

Does this make any sense at all? Do you see my problem?

Thanks so much for writing, Professor!

Then I gather you disagree with Prof. Mayr? Ha! That puts us in the same camp, RWP! :^)

I don't think so. I was arguing that biology is indeed autonomous, because even if we can reduce life to the motions of elementary particles, that on its own doesn't give us a very meaningful 'big picture'. There are the trees, and then there is the forest.

IOW, if one says that physico-chemical laws alone specify everything that goes on in the natural world, wouldn't this be tantamount to saying that the whole is completely reducible to the behavior of its parts?

Not at all. Even if we can describe the properties of water with complete accuracy from quantum mechanics, using an oxygen nucleus, two hydrogen nuclei and 10 electrons, when we've computed all of the molecular interactions and the properties, there will be some large scale properties - e.g. wetness - that aren't easily deducible from the small scale properties. They're there, but they have to be deduced from the raw output. Call them emergent properties, or whatever. So, while our mechanics gives us the ability to predict the behavior of water with exactness, it doesn't give us much useful insight. We still have to look at all of the detailed trajectories of the particles, and say - aha, wetness!

This is getting to be a ubiquitous and persistent problem in science, because our computers are now so powerful that calculating things is fast, but analyzing what we just calculated is slow, as slow as anything else that requires human insight. And a lot of scientists are lazy, and just want to run the calculations, without sitting down later to figure out what it was they just calculated.

So all those people who worry that someone one some day might be able to run BettyBoopSim 5.0 and get output that exactly matches your own behavior have missed a very big point. All they will have done is, in effect, cloned you. Even though they can predict your every action, they won't understand you, or anything that motivates you.