> ravi wrote: [clip] I would say that the problem is that a lot of
> popularisation of genetics /biochemistry /neuroscience/etc rests on a
> dismissal of higher-level descriptions and analysis. Practitioners
> within the latter industry do not wish so much to engage with the former
> but to dismiss them as outmoded or irrelevant or imprecise.
>
> This sounds interesting, but I at least cannot grasp what you are
> saying. In particular the content of "latter" and "former" is unclear.
I take ravi to be making a critique of reductionism -- the idea that chemistry, e.g., reduces to physics and doesn't constitute a level of description valid and useful in its own right.
It's a chronic problem -- the idea that there is a privileged ontological level (the atom or the quark or the gene) and everything else is just illusion, or epiphenomenon, or at best circumlocution for what's happening at the real, privileged causal level.
This habit of mind has a reactionary thrust, I think, though I've never been able to articulate this case in terms that satisfied me.
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org