"The case in point is the method of reductionism, the most pervasive myth of normal science. As a basic dogma of the scientific subcultures, reductionism isn't taught, questioned, or analyzed. It's tacitly accepted as a necessary path to understanding. Following this road, we've not only reduced Nature into smaller and smaller parts, we've reduced science itself to narrower and narrower academic specialties. The worldview of these disjointed disciplines is limited to highly constricted horizons that prevent even seeing into other disciplines, much less the whole of Nature.

In short, normal science is a box of closed boxes. The problem is, to solve the puzzles of Nature, we need to see them from outside all of these boxes.

Reductive specialization invites perilous consequences. Just as specialization precedes extinction in the natural selection of species, it foreshadows irrelevance in science. The irrelevance of normal science to living systems can be appreciated by reducing reductionism itself to absurdity.

According to the mythology of science, we will eventually understand living systems if we divide them into increasingly simpler parts--organs, cells, molecules, and finally the fundamental particles and forces studied in physics. This is absurd because neutrons, protons, and electrons, the rudimentary parts of, say, possums, are also the rudimentary parts of every other material system. They don't entail possumness."