These are Simon Penny's 'paradigm busters' -- scientific ideas that have transformed our understanding of the world we live in

Entropy and Self-organization.
Since the mid C19th, the second law of thermodynamics has held western culture in its nihilism inducing grip. This in itself indicates just how powerful the grip of science and particularly physics has been in the last century. It's strange because experientially we know life is anti-entropic. New science, in the form of the ideas of self-organization and emergent order has validated this intuition and liberated us from the defeatism of the 2nd law. That is not to say that the 2nd law is no longer valid, but that extrapolation of its implications into the life sciences and humanities has been shown to be misplaced. As Beckers, Holland and Deneubourg have persuasively demonstrated, random behavior amongst simple animals or machines can result in an anti-entropic (11) outcome.

The ideas that Chaos theory brought:
strange and chaotic attractors, bifurcation and fractality, and particularly 'sensitive dependance on initial conditions' revealed vast jungles of unpredicability in the heart of newtonian physics. (9) The adage that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon will cause a typhoon in India has achieved the status of a clichŽ, but it underlines the oft-edited fact that classical physics can deal with only a small subset of physical phenomena and ignores the rest.

Fractality.
The significance of fractals (10) will not be found in any number of computer renderings of the Manderlbrot set, nor in their application to computer graphic simulations of fictitious valleys, islands and planets. Fractals show us a geometry which approximates the logic of natural growth: recursive, multi-scaled, infinitely detailed, with symmetry across scale. This idea not only replicates the generative and recursive geometries of biology, but exposes the roots of Euclidian geometry in Platonic abstraction. The geometry of Euclid, premised on lines infinitely thin and points infinitely small, is steeped in intellectual abstraction, predicated on the notion of an 'ideal'. Newtons mechanics is itself predicated on this style of abstraction.

It is worth noting that what have come to be called Fractals were a late C19th mathematical oddity which languished as a mathematical curiosity until the vast arithmetic ability of the digital computer became available. The propensity of the computer for large scale iteration is like biological process (nature, ifyou like) to some extent, and offers techniques relevant to the study of population dynamics, such as the mutation rates amongst bacteria colonies.

Emergence and Reductivism.
Perhaps the most far reaching implication of self organisation and emergent order in complex dynamics is the demise of the entire method of reductivism. Reductivism is a keystone of the scientific method (12) . It is premised on the assumption that to understand a complex object, one breaks it into component parts and examines those parts in controlled settings, then adds the results of those examinations together. The basic principal of emergence is that organisation (behavior/order/meaning) can arise from the agglomeration of small component units which do not exhibit those characteristics. Emergent order implies that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts, that higher level behaviors cannot be disassembled into their component lower level building blocks. Simple examples include the generation of mind form

individual neurons and the complex behaviors of colonial insects and organisms.
Inherent in this pheonomenon is a critique of reductionism, the major tool of science, which is premised on the assumption that to examine a complex object, one breaks it into component parts and examines those parts in controlled settings. Complete understanding arises when those parts are added together. Emergence throws that method in the trash. As De Landa (13) puts it: "The road to reductionism has been permanently blocked. If the properties of matter and energy at any given level of organisation cannot be explained by the properties of the underlying levels, it follows that biology cannot be reduced to physics or anthropology to biology" [14] Or one might add, psychology to physiology.

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