I just got done reading the first chapter in Mayr's
This Is Biology, which is about the questin "What is Life?"
He discusses physicalists and vitalists, and comes to the conclusion that they were both right and both wrong. The physicalists were wrong in trying to describe all of life in terms of physico-chemical laws, and the vitalists were wrong in thinking there was a fundamental vital force in life. He concludes one of the key concepts they were missing was that of emergence.
"The whole is more than the sum of its part" comes up a lot in biology, and for some reason it always seemed like an unuseful way of describing biological organization. The point people seem to be making with this is that if you just took the components of life and threw them in a vat you will not get anything interesting happening. The key is not just what we are made of but how our constituents of organized.
But, is "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" or "emergence" really a useful way to describe it. Why not just "Life must be understood in terms of its material make up and its organization", i.e., material cause and formal cause (as well as the final evolutionary cause).
The claim of emergence is that you cannot predict the behavior of the whole from knowing about its parts. But is this really true? Is it a pragmatic difficulty or a fundamental reality? I was reading the Wikipedia site about "Emergence" and it said that an air molecule was a good example of emergence. You could not, the site claimed, predict the behavior of a bunch of air molecules from knowing the properties of one of them; you could not predict it would be good at transmitting sound. But why not? It seems you could if you understand how an air molecule would behave in a collision. Or isn't this considered a property? If that is the case then it seems like a shallow semantic argument.
I understand this post is something of a ramble, but that merely reflects my confusion with regard to this subject.
Edited by JustinC, : Spelling
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