Abstract

Whether the work and thought of Charles Darwin can be more accurately described as reductionist or holist remains a strangely unresolved question to this day. Darwin is a legitimate heir to two distinct intellectual traditions: romantic natural philosophy of Von Humboldt and Goethe (with a significant inspiration drawn from Kant) and Victorian natural science of Herschel and Lyell. While Darwin's focus on uncovering evolutionary mechanisms (and, crucially, demonstration that a single type of mechanism - natural selection - explains much of the incredible diversity of living forms) induces many scholars to consider him an epitome of scientific reductionism, there appear to be equal grounds to regard this titan of science as thorougly holistic in his approach to life's history on our planet. Was Darwin, then, a reductionist or a holist? Perhaps there is another way to answer this question (or even better, another way to ask it): is it possible one can be reductionist and holist? Namely, contrary to eminently reductionist early and classical Modern Syntheses in evolutionary biology, both Darwin's original body of work and many today's developments in evolutionary biology, subsumed unter the label of Extended Synthesis - centered on shifting tempo and mode of evolution, punctuated equilibria, hierarchical multilevel selection, ecological-evolutionary-developmental (eco-evo-devo) feedback integration, phenotypic plasticity, and, last but not least, recent works by W. Ford Doolittle and others attempting to unify the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis with evolution by natural selection and evolutionary worldview in general - seem to offer us a glimpse of complex multidimensional landscapes underlying biology as we know it (and, through continuing astrobiological reasearch, potentially also biology as we do not know it). All of this could be but a foretaste of a promising direction in our scientific and philosophical endeavor to understand life - one transcending the classical dichotomy of reductionism vs. holism, not without resonance with great philosophical traditions seeking the Union of Opposites.