by Chris Cumo

SCIENCE, THE JOURNAL of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is arguably the most influential periodical of its kind. Its 160,000 subscribers make it the largest peer-reviewed scientific journal. The AAAS publishes Science weekly, giving it a currency few journals in any discipline can match. Article topics range from recombinant DNA to photosynthesis. Between 1995 and 2000 43 percent of articles focused on biology, 22 percent on geology, 18 percent on chemistry, 13 percent on physics and 4 percent on astronomy. The dominance of biology is no surprise. "This is the golden age of life Science," said Bill Buffington, general manager of Agilent Technologies, in the 1 September 2000 issue of Science. The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity in 1900 has ignited the Sciences of genetics and molecular biology, which yielded the hybrid corn revolution of the 1920s, the discovery of DNA's structure and function in 1952, the discovery of antibiotics and the development of vaccines throughout the century, the rise of gene splicing in the 1970s, and the completion of a rough map of the human genome in 2000. Biology is now the queen of the Sciences, a title 19th-century British physicist William Thompson once reserved for physics.

These disciplines, and Science, share reductionism in common. The article "Genomics: Building a Case for Sequencing the Chimp," in the 25 August 2000 issue of Science implies that chimpanzees and humans are merely an aggregate of genes. Everything about us from the color of our eyes to the ideas in our brains is encoded in our DNA. Ideas are nothing more than electrical patterns in the brain argues Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of DNA's structure. He is correlating each pattern with an emotion or ideas. The brain is no tabular Rosa, as John Lock asserted; it is a labyrinth of electrochemical circuits. At the most basic level, the human is nothing more than a composite of atoms. The wisdom of Democritus lives in the physics of Frank Tipler. The Tulane University mathematician and physicist believes we are the sum of the quantum mechanical states of our atoms. Evolution too mouths the credo of reductionism.

Welcome! The article you'd like to read is available to Adjunct Advocate subscribers, or to non-subscribers for purchase with AdjunctNation Passport credits. Your AdjunctNation Passport credit purchases compensate the writers directly!

If you like, visit our secure online store to purchase AdjunctNation Passport credits or subscribe. PLEASE NOTE: If you're already registered, you don't need to register again to read the article! You need to login, go to our secure online store, and purchase AdjunctNationCredits.