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Identifying a gap in our understanding of something can be as conversely significant as a given finding. I take umbrage with allowing reductionism to prevent consideration of other ideas where it fails to explain something. I know it's not scientific to suppose the balance of life's complex systems is deterministic, but if you look at population dynamics a possible explanation is homeostasis as the destination state. The motivations of the individual be damned, life seems to find a balance. Perhaps our understanding of what's really going on in the biosphere is as limited as the perspective of an immune cell in the human body. Just saying, determinism might not be terribly scientific, but it's still worth considering in the context of what we can't explain with reductionism. You have to admit, what we're all experiencing right now, life, is pretty flippin' remarkable.



Maybe I am misunderstanding the terms we are using. Allow me to articulate what I think the valuable line of inquiry is here, and then maybe you can identify what I am missing philosophically, because I'm still not sure exactly what that is, even after reading your comment.

In my thinking, a reductionist thought process goes something like this: we observe oxidation of the hydrogen sulfide in mud, even when there are no apparent electron acceptors in the immediate vicinity. We then identify bacterial filaments which appear to allow electron transport from the reducing agent to the electron acceptor. Furthermore, we will then attempt to isolate the bacteria making up the filaments, and then attempt to identify what structures they synthesize to allow this feat.

And a few follow up questions to your comment: what do you think population dynamics have to do with the current phenomenon, or was that more a related thought? When you talk about "destination states," are you insinuating that there is some design occurring, or that we can observe states in the state space that seem to be stable, and that random walks tend to end up in those stable states? If it is the latter, I totally agree, and I don't see how that is outside of the purview of science as traditionally practiced. It might be an interpretation or model for how the parts of a system fit together, but an attempt at synthesis is basically in the conclusions section of any paper ever written in biology. So I guess it boils down to the same question I posed earlier: how exactly are scientists failing to describe natural phenomena?




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