Further Discussion of Emergent Evolution

Abstract

However, reductionism, even at its apogee, never completely supplanted emergentism in one area — that of the philosophy of biology — where proponents of the theory of “integrative levels” defended a hierarchy of organic units featuring novel properties, and recognized that though biology was based on the physical sciences, it was not reducible to them. The reductionist project, even if it resulted in achievements such as the Encyclopedia of Unified Science, did not succeed in reducing all of science to physics, a point which the logical positivists themselves came to admit.t Since the mid-1950s, the concept of emergentism has been rehabilitated, to the point that it has once more taken its place as a legitimate basis for philosophy of science and metaphysical systems based on science.