What lead biologists to reject organicism?

[pluto2]

What lead biologists to reject organicism in favor of mechanism?

Organicism is a philosophical orientation that asserts that reality is best understood as an organic whole.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organicism

 

[Hipparchia]

Mechanism works and is readily subject to measurement and clear delineaiton of process. Equally, a reductionist approach is not the major weapon of ethologists or ecologists. I think your opening premise is flawed.

 

[wellwisher]

A good way to contrast the two orentiations is looking at a forest from a distance compared to looking at the same forest, while being inside the forest. The distant vision gives one a better feel for how the entire forest is organized as a unit. The close and personal view can see many more details but it can have a difficult time seeing the entire forest because of the trees. It may assume the close trees extend all the way to the end.

I have done this before. Say we had a photo. I cover 95% of the photo with tape, so you can only see the exposed 5%. Although we can zoom in and tell many things about that exposed 5%, it is not clear what the biggest picture is with 95% covered. The 5% could be a flower. Is this flower in a vase, in a field, in a garden, in a store, etc. All seem like valid assumptions, since it is hard to tell with 95% covered.

On the other hand, if we look at the entire picture, we have an integrated context for what the entire pcture is all about. Next, if we zoom in to the same 5%, and look at the same detail of the flower, there is now only one theory that conforms to the global context. But from 5% exposed and 95% in the dark, there is more room for more theories, most of which will be a relative illusions.

 

[rpenner]

What lead biologists to reject organicism in favor of mechanism? ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organicism

I think your opening premise is flawed.

The premise is flawed because the cited wikipedia page gave two definitions of the term. Philosophical Organicism and Biological Organicism are both described in the first two paragraphs.

Organicism is a philosophical orientation that asserts that reality is best understood as an organic whole. By definition it is close to holism. Plato, Hobbes or Constantin Brunner are examples of such philosophical thought.

Organicism is also a biological doctrine that stresses the organization, rather than the composition, of organisms. William Emerson Ritter coined the term in 1919. Organicism became well-accepted in the 20th century.

An earlier version of the article mentions reasons why it is politically controversial:

Organicism has some intellectually and politically controversial or suspect associations. "Holism," the doctrine that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, often used synonymously with organicism, or as a broader category under which organicism falls, has been coopted in recent decades by "holistic medicine" and by New Age Thought. German Nazism appealed to organicist and holistic doctrines, discrediting for many in retrospect, the original organicist doctrines. (See Anne Harrington). Soviet Dialectical Materialism also made appeals to an holistic and organicist approach stemming from Hegel via Karl Marx's co-worker Friedrich Engels, again giving a controversial political association to organicism.

Organicism' has also been used to characterize notions put forth by various late 19th-century social scientists who considered human society to be analogous to an organism, and individual humans to be analogous to the cells of an organism. This sort of organicist sociology was articulated by Alfred Espinas, Paul von Lilienfeld, Jacques Novicow, Albert Schäffle, Herbert Spencer, and René Worms, among others (Barberis 2003: 54).

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Organicism&oldid=236900570

Better than Wikipedia is this open access journal article which seems reliable:

Gilbert, S. F. and Sarkar, S. (2000), "Embracing complexity: Organicism for the 21st century." Dev. Dyn., 219: pp. 1–9. doi: 10.1002/1097-0177(2000)9999:9999<::AID-DVDY1036>3.0.CO;2-A

So while it is a philosophical approach, it's not a very prescriptive approach like reductionism. It seems to be emphasize a split between what something is and what something does (in context).

First, what a gene “does” depends on its context. The function of a gene or gene product depends on its interactions with other genes and gene products. β-Catenin can be an adhesion protein in the liver or a transcription factor in the skin. Lactate dehydrogenase can be an enzyme in the muscle or a structural crystallin in the eye.

Except, you don't have to embrace organicism to work out that for oneself.

 

[pluto2]

Mechanism works and is readily subject to measurement and clear delineaiton of process.

But mechanistic biology is very much flawed too and pretty much of what they teach in biology today is already outdated science.

That's because I think that organism triumphs over mechanism and that life triumphs over death.