We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.
—TALMUD
An old story: Six blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each feels a different body part: leg, tusk, trunk, tail, ear, and belly. Predictably, each offers a vastly different assessment: pillar, pipe, tree branch, rope, fan, and wall. They argue vigorously, each sure that their experience alone is the correct one.
I can’t think of a better metaphor to highlight the big problem with scientific research today. Except that instead of six blind men, modern science tasks 60,000 researchers to examine the elephant, each through a different lens.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. You could argue that the six men, each focused on an individual part, together produce a richer and more detailed description of an elephant than could be generated by one person just walking around looking at the creature in its entirety. Similarly, think of the level of detailed understanding that 60,000 scientists can glean when they are empowered to focus on such granular component parts.
The problem arises only when, as in the parable, the individual points of view are mistakenly seen as describing the whole truth. When a laser-like focus is misunderstood as a global overview. When the six men or 60,000 researchers don’t talk to one another or acknowledge that the overall goal of the exploration is to perceive and appreciate the whole elephant. When they assume that any view that questions their own is simply wrong.
In this chapter, we’ll look at the two competing paradigms in science and medicine: reductionism and wholism. We’ll see that the triumph of reductionism over wholism over the past several hundred years—rather than reductionism being used as a tool in the service of wholistic understanding—has seriously impaired our ability to make sense of the world.
THE LIMITS OF PARADIGMS
In a 2005 commencement address, the late novelist David Foster Wallace told a story that gets to the heart of how paradigms work: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”1
We talked about paradigms in chapter three to help explain the way many of my colleagues reacted to our research findings about animal protein and the health benefits of a WFPB diet. I compared my experience to that of a fish who leaves the water and encounters air for the first time: because I found myself outside the predominant scientific paradigm, I was therefore able to better understand where the limitations of that paradigm were.
What we didn’t look at in that chapter was the purpose of paradigms, along with their benefits and weaknesses. Paradigms start out as useful ways to frame knowledge and test theories. In fact, I would argue, we can’t really live without them. We certainly can’t advance our knowledge of the universe without them.
In its broadest sense, a paradigm is a mental filter that restricts what you are able to see at any one time. Mental filters are essential; without your brain’s reticular activating system, you would be overwhelmed by stimuli and therefore unable to respond to the important ones. Without the ability to focus on one thing and shut out distractions, you wouldn’t be able to get much done. And in science, without the literal filters of microscopes and telescopes, we would know precious little about inner and outer space.
Filters—mental and literal—become problematic only when we forget about them and think that what we’re seeing is the whole of reality, instead of a very narrow slice of it. Paradigms become prisons only when we stop recognizing them as paradigms—when we think that water is all there is, so we don’t even have a name for it anymore. In a world shaped by the paradigm of water, anyone who suggests the existence of “not water” is automatically a heretic, a lunatic, or a clown.
So first, let’s dive into some troubling philosophical waters and try to pin down those two competing paradigms I introduced a few pages ago: reductionism and wholism.
REDUCTIONISM VERSUS WHOLISM
If you are a reductionist, you believe that everything in the world can be understood if you understand all its component parts. A wholist, on the other hand, believes that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. That’s it: the entire debate in a nutshell. But the debate is one that has been raging among philosophers, theologians, and scientists since antiquity. Is this just academic philosophy, the equivalent of arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Hardly. As we’ll see, choosing one paradigm or the other leads to very different approaches to science, medicine, commerce, politics, and life itself.
I’ll show how these approaches influence our understanding of nutrition in chapter five. For now, let’s look more broadly at the battle between wholism and reductionism, and explore how the latter got the upper hand.
I must begin by saying that it’s a battle that isn’t actually necessary; there’s no inherent conflict between the reductionist techniques of science and an overarching wholistic outlook. Reductionism is not, in itself, a bad thing. Indeed, reductionist research has been responsible for some of the most profound breakthroughs of the past several centuries. From anatomy to physics to astronomy to biology to geology, we have gained a greater appreciation of—and ability to interact positively with—the universe through scientific advances brought about by the focused, controlled experimentation of reductionism.
Wholism does not oppose reductionism; rather, wholism encompasses reductionism, just as each whole encompasses its parts. I don’t think we need to reverse two millennia of scientific progress and go back to a time where humans worshipped nature without desiring to understand its workings. I think it’s great that we’ve got six blind men working on the elephant problem. I just wish someone would clue them in about the whole elephant.
You may be puzzled by my spelling of the word wholism with a “w.” The more common spelling is holism, which I think is part of the problem. Holism reminds scientists of the word holy, which smacks of religion. And many scientists are as hostile to religion as religious fundamentalists are to science. When they encounter the word holistic, they think of sloppy, “fairy-tale” belief systems that have no place in a serious exploration of the “real world.” Ironically, this dismissal of wholism by scientists is the height of dogmatism, a fundamentalist stance that denies the possibility of any truth other than that granted by reductionism. I can just see my science colleagues recoiling at the suggestion that we might be raging fundamentalists without knowing it!
REDUCTIONISM: A HISTORY
From the beginning of our existence, humans have had an insatiable desire to know more about our world and ourselves. Where did we come from? What are human emotions, and how do we come to grips with them? Where are we going? What is the meaning of life?
In ancient Greece—the birthplace of much of Western thought—the philosophies of science and theology were closely intertwined, with much common ground. Both dealt with the all-time great questions concerning the meaning of human existence and the mystery of nature’s secrets. They worked hand in hand, with science providing the raw materials—the observations—and theology working those raw materials into overarching theories, or big stories about the universe.
Science and theology are both lenses through which to interact with and interpret reality, sort of like a microscope and a pair of binoculars. Both sets of lenses tell us more about the world than we could see with the naked eye, but the information we get from each can diverge considerably. Greek scientist/theologians such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Aristotle, or Plato would have chafed at the suggestion that they choose one instrument and abandon the other. These philosophers (literally, “lovers of wisdom”) wrote and spoke about food and health, justice, women’s rights, literature, and theology as easily and with as much passion and conviction as they wrote about geology, physics, and mathematics.
Somewhere along the line—and I don’t claim to be a historian, so I’ll leave the details to them—science and theology diverged, to the impoverishment of both. Church officials attached rigid dogmas to certain understandings of the universe, with the result that any questioning of those understandings constituted heresy. Science went into retreat in the West. What had been perfectly logical scientific assumptions based on observable facts (such as the earth being the center of the universe, as in Ptolemaic astronomy) were distorted into immutable principles of faith. Firsthand observation of reality was now rightly viewed as a dangerous activity—for what if you observed something that contradicted current theology?
It was not until the thirteenth century or so that science began to reemerge, thus defining a new era, the Renaissance, that led to a clash between the faith-based and rationalist viewpoints. Scholars rediscovered the writings of the classical Greeks and were inspired to pursue their methods of observation instead of clinging to faith-based conclusions. Copernicus (1473–1543) challenged theological dogma by offering that the sun, not the earth, occupied center stage of our known universe. Galileo (1564–1642) invented the telescope and showed that Copernicus was right.
For the next 300 years (1600–1900), many notable and courageous scholars and scientists made observations that continued to build a foundation for the supremacy of scientific facts over theological faith—at least in the minds of many. Human-based, reasoned observations and thought—humanism—flourished, and it proved itself both enlightening and useful.
But this new humanism, having clawed its way to respectability against a doctrinaire Church, became far less tolerant of theology than its classical Greek ancestor. Rather than seeking partnership with theologians, scientists increasingly sought to distance themselves and their endeavors from “superstitions” not grounded in observable fact. This included not just religion, but any idea that did not adhere to scientific views, in which truth was found only through breaking down the observable world into as many smaller parts as possible. In short: reductionism. Although what we humans can observe has changed and grown over time, that fundamental belief about truth has not. Each new advancement in technology only allows us to break the world into smaller and smaller pieces.
The history of the last 200 years has been the inexorable march of reductionism in all aspects of our lives, from science, to nutrition, to education (think of all the “subjects” taught in isolation from one another), to economics (think of microeconomics versus macroeconomics), and even the human soul (think of how it has been reduced to a map of nerves and networks in the brain).
THINGS REDUCTIONISM CAN’T EXPLAIN
Looking at our approach to understanding today, it would appear that reductionism, wearing the guise of science, has won—but at great cost to our understanding of the world. In rejecting religious control of science, we also are rejecting the useful perspectives theology offers: a way of looking at the world as a fundamentally connected whole. A willingness to accept that there are things we may not ever be able to fully understand, and instead can only observe.
Mere “scientific” facts cannot fully explain more than a minuscule part of the far-reaching and complex personal emotions we feel when we experience special moments of our lives or stand before the great wonders of the world. Could facts ever fully explain the inspiration and awe we feel when listening to great music, wondering about the beginning and end of the universe, or admiring other people’s talents and emotions? Could describing an enzyme activity, nerve transmission, or hormonal burst really capture what it is like to experience that admiration or those emotions? These things are unimaginably complex and therefore beyond the tools of objective material inquiry. The Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated through his incompleteness theorem (published in 1931) the futility of using reductionist techniques to model a complex system. He proved mathematically that no complex system could be known in its entirety, and that any system that could be known in its entirety was merely a subset of a larger one. In other words, science can never fully describe the universe. No matter how strong the lens or how powerful the computer, we will never be able to model with complete accuracy the chemical reactions that occur when we do something as simple and mundane as watch a sunset. It’s not just a technical matter of better tools and more computing power. It’s as if reality itself defies the attempt.
At the same time that Gödel was discovering the limits of math to describe numerical reality, particle physicists were realizing that their enhanced tools of perception were inadequate to nail down physical reality as well. Light was either a particle or a wave, depending on how you observed it. Quantum physics dispensed with objectivity altogether, describing subatomic particles in terms of probabilities rather than realities. Werner Heisenberg showed that we could at any moment observe either the position or the speed of an electron, but not both.
Reductionism—in effect, the quest for this kind of full disclosure—is incredibly useful, but the more we learn, the more clear it is that reductionism is insufficient to the task of understanding the universe.
THE DA VINCI MODE
The way we practice science today is the result, then, of a post-Renaissance rejection of a more (w)holistic way of looking at the world along with religion itself. But returning to the pre-Renaissance division of labor between scientists and theologians isn’t the answer either. To find a useful model for us today—a model of a scientist who deploys reductionist methods within a wholistic framework—we have to go back to the Renaissance itself.
There may be no individual whose accomplishments were more symbolic of the integration of science and wholism than the ultimate Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). Da Vinci’s exceptional significance and reputation was not only due to his brilliant talents in art (e.g., Mona Lisa, The Last Supper), but also because he was an exceptional scientist. His interests in science were unusually broad, ranging from the biological (anatomy, zoology, and botany) to the physical (geology, optics, aerodynamics, and hydrodynamics). Da Vinci’s accomplishments were extraordinary even by modern measures, and, lest we forget, they were achieved over 500 years ago!
Da Vinci had a keen interest in the reality and the wonders of nature as a broad and dynamic whole. The subject matter of his inspired paintings was almost more wondrous than reality, reflecting to me, at least, his understanding of what it means to be human—also a very large and dynamic whole. Da Vinci was also deeply curious about the small details that might be able to explain the human-perceived wonders he painted. This can be readily seen both in his drawings of anatomical structures in biology and his refined representations of mechanical structures in physics. He published amazingly detailed drawings of human anatomy, where, as one biographer noted, he paid “attention to the forms of even very small organs, capillaries and hidden parts of the skeleton.” Da Vinci is even credited with being the first in the modern world to introduce the idea of controlled experimentation—the core concept of science—and, for this, he has been considered by some writers to be the Father of Science. Probably more than any other scholastic luminary of that time, he recognized the relationship between the whole and its parts.
Da Vinci was what we call a polymath, a term that refers to his exceptional range of artistic, humanistic, and scientific talents. But more relevant than his specific achievements for the purposes of this book is Da Vinci’s scholarship, which advanced and supported a new way of thinking: a synthesis of the whole and its parts. He embraced both breadth and depth of thinking both by paying attention to emerging facts and details as they were made available by science, and by apprehending the rapture of human emotion when all parts, known and unknown, acted in symphony to become the whole.
Da Vinci’s contributions to our understanding of the universe are profound and enduring precisely because of this integration. He understood that wholism needed reductionism to advance, and reductionism needed wholism to remain relevant. He realized that when you take something out of context to study it more closely or measure it more exactly, you risk losing more wisdom than you gain.
THE “WHOLE” IN WHOLISM
The South African statesman and philosopher Jan Smuts, who is credited with coining the term holism (without the “w”), wrote that reality consists of a “great whole” that comprises “small natural center[s] of wholeness.” In my work, the body is the great whole and the process by which the body digests food is a smaller center of wholeness within the body. (Nutrition is one perspective on the wholeness of the body.) You can apply this concept to refer also to a human being as a small center of wholeness within the great whole of the biosphere of planet Earth, or to a single human cell as a great whole, of which the mitochondria, DNA, and other blobs you studied in high school biology are small, natural centers that are also whole unto themselves. In either direction, you can continue as far as observation and then your imagination can take you. From the macrocosmic universe to the microcosmic ones, there is, philosophically speaking, a hierarchy of wholes, with each whole having parts that themselves are wholes.
In this book I will be discussing only a few selected parts of biology: genetic expression, intracellular metabolism, and nutrition. Each of these is, in and of itself, an incomprehensibly complex system. But I am somewhat uncomfortable dividing biology into systems at all, because this infers boundaries that are, in reality, vague and arbitrary. Although an organ in the body certainly has physical boundaries, it still communicates with other organs within the body via nerve transmission and hormonal communication, among other means. Every entity within the body, whether physical or metabolic, is both a whole and a part. We have to divide wholes into their component parts so we can talk about them effectively, but even as we do so, we need to remain aware that such divisions are somewhat arbitrary.
Indeed, thinking that our classification system is a perfect mapping of reality is a limiting and potentially dangerous stance. For example, Western medicine views the body geographically; it treats the liver, the kidney, the heart, the left patella, and so on. Chinese medicine, by contrast, sees the body as an energetic network. It might diagnose a patient with a Western label of “liver cancer” as suffering from “too much yang in the triple burner meridian”—a description of an energetic imbalance affecting the so-called burning regions of the body, centered around the head, the chest, and the pelvis. When Western doctors first encountered this system, the vast majority of them dismissed the talk of chi energy and meridians as superstition, as opposed to the “objective reality” of organs, bones, fluids, and muscles. But the documented efficacy of acupuncture, which moves energy along meridians to treat many ailments, testifies to the usefulness of the Chinese paradigm.
Some of you may argue that our limited understanding of biology is a failure of technology, not of paradigm—that, sure, the biological system is beyond our ability to comprehend it now, but at some point, we will have a reductionist lens powerful enough to understand even its complexity. To return to our elephant metaphor, we might increase the number of blind men well into the millions, make each one responsible for understanding a microscopic part of the elephant, and then employ advanced computational methods and a massive supercomputer to put it all together. That, in effect, is the thesis of the famed futurist, Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, who imagines our being able to create, from scratch, a human body, once we know all the parts and develop supercomputers sufficiently powerful to enable us to do so.
But I submit that this viewpoint is naïve—at least for biological systems like a whole body. As an example, let’s take the enzyme, a protein that is instrumental to the various chemical reactions necessary for the proper function of the human body, like the digestion of food and the construction of cells. Through experimentation and observation, we can discern the chemical composition, size, shape, and some of the functionality of the enzyme. Is a summation of these things the enzyme? According to modern science, the answer is yes. Modern science sees the enzyme as a discrete entity, with discernable edges, and its goal is to discern these edges.
If the world was, indeed, an accumulation of parts, each defined by discernable edges, then perhaps at some future point the technologists could understand the human body through a reductionist lens powered by supercomputers, complex computational models, and other technologies. But the world is far more complex than this. The enzyme is not, in fact, a discrete unit that stands alone; it is an integral element of a larger system. It exists in service to the system, as does every other element of that system. If an element ever ceases to act in service to its system, as with uncontrolled cancer growth, the system breaks down, and may even fail entirely. Because each part is an integral element of the same system, all the parts are connected to one another; no one part stands alone. And this means each part affects and is affected by the other parts. Removing or modifying a part changes the whole, just as changing the whole, as we will see in later discussions, impacts the parts—that is, when one part is altered, all the other parts are forced to adapt to try and keep the system running.
In this scenario, the discrete boundaries we assign to individual parts melt away. Put simply, there are no fixed “edges” within the human body that separate any one part from all the other parts. In their place are infinite connection and unending change, and it is this continual cascade of causes and effects that renders reductionist prediction models useless.
This lack of boundaries is important because it means that each “part” of the body involves more than what can be seen when the part is viewed, as it is in reductionism, in isolation from the larger system it serves. What the enzyme is made of, what it looks like, what it does, and why it does it—all of this is a function of the larger system that is the human body. Better, more powerful technology doesn’t alter that fundamental reality. No matter how many blind men you employ to observe parts of the elephant, and no matter how much technology is available to support them, you can never generate the understanding required to see the full elephant.
When I lament the idea of taking a part out of context of the whole—whether that part is a nutrient, biological mechanism, or something else—this is what I am lamenting: how, in studying parts out of context, we blind ourselves to wholistic interpretations as well as the real-life solutions to human health those interpretations would provide.
THE INTELLECTUAL COST OF REDUCTIONIST VICTORY
I hope I’m being clear that I’m not advocating a return to faith-based dogmatic acceptance of any authority’s views on reality. To the contrary, I’m asserting that we need less dogma and more open-mindedness in the scientific community when it comes to observing and describing our world. One of the core principles of science—the key element that distinguishes it from every other way of looking at the world—is the idea of falsifiability. Basically, if a theory is falsifiable, that means that evidence can be offered to disprove it. The opposite stance, dogma, is, by definition, anything that is considered unfalsifiable.
Let’s say you believe that the bus from New York City to Ithaca always arrives on time. You would agree, I assume, that if it pulled into the station twenty minutes late one day, that would prove your theory false. You might then amend your theory to “95 percent of the time,” or to “within half an hour of its scheduled arrival time,” and we could agree on observations and experiments that might support or contradict those new theories. But the key point is, you accept in advance that some configuration of observable facts could partially or completely invalidate your theory.
Contrast that with belief in an afterlife in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. If you ask those who believe in this brand of an afterlife what evidence would cause them to reconsider that belief, they are most likely to stare at you in confusion. Such faith is not open to factual contradiction. Even if you don’t believe in such an afterlife, can you think of any facts that we could gather that might invalidate it? I’m not saying such a belief is right or wrong, just that it’s not science because it can’t be disproved, or falsified, by observation or experimentation.
The reductionist paradigm is dogma, an article of faith; it rejects, beforehand, the idea that it may not always be the best or only way to apprehend and measure reality. And modern science (and the biological and health sciences in particular) has embraced the dogma of reductionism to the exclusion of common sense and fairness. The most respected and learned individuals in our society are trained to operate exclusively within the confines of this dogma. To return to an earlier metaphor: these individuals spend their time studying and writing about the minutiae of elephants without a single one of them being aware that there is such a thing as an elephant. The tragedy is, this is the system we have entrusted with the search for truth, whose findings determine our public policy and influence our private choices.