snip: In careful accommodation to the spirit of this analysis, one could disassemble a candle molecule by molecule, and the wick thread by thread, reassembling the candle in a new place with every component in its proper place. One would be hard pressed to be able to distinguish any difference from one to the other.
Spirited: The very notion that fallible man could unmake a candle and wick and then remake both to their former state is nothing short of magic-thinking. By far the easiest part of this fantasy resides in the unmaking of the wick. Yet even here, the act of untwisting and separating the threads would result in irreparable damage to them. In short, the threads having been permanently altered by the act of unmaking, will never return to their former state.
And yet, that's actually the easy part. Just how would one go about disassembling a flame?
As physical objects go, candles are relatively low-tech. One wonders what level of technology Mr. Mikulecky is envisioning in his comparisons of complex systems versus machines. My point about the candle is that complexity is in the eye of the beholder.
Excellent insight spirited irish!
Implicit in NicknamedBob's proposal is the presupposition that nature is fundamentally material and mechanical. Therefore, systems in Nature, just like machines, can be taken apart and reassembled without any loss of information whatsoever, completely reconstituting the original whole. Thus, the whole is simply nothing more than the sum of its parts.
Yet this expectation, matched against experience (e.g., as you point out, the alteration of the parts that necessarily occurs just by handling them) falls like a house of cards even at the machine level.
And yet it's now pretty clear that complex systems in Nature — preeminently living organisms — are not "material machines" and cannot be reduced to their parts and then later reconstituted back into their originals. (This is obvious from direct observation anyway.) The reduction itself destroys vital information necessary at all organizational levels of the system. Thus the whole is more than the mere sum of its parts.
The question for biology: What is "lost" upon such a hypothetical reduction?
I wonder when biologists will begin to ask this question, but I'm not holding my breath. Evidently, they are too committed to the Newtonian Paradigm to think it worth asking. And that is why biology is "in crisis" right now....