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6 <title>Arkian - Holism</title>
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12 <h1>Holism</h1>
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14 <p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism">Holism</a> is the noun form of holistic and is the opposite of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism">reductionism</a>. A reductionist approach makes sense in systems where one can isolate cause. Where one can't isolate cause, a hostic approach makes sense.</p>
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16 <p>Hard science is a clear area where reductionism makes sense. Controlled experiments allow one to isolate cause.</p>
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18 <p>Medicine is borderline case. Most of modern medicine is simply garbage. Medical studies depend on statistics which is often abused, see <a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff-ebook/dp/B00351DSX2/">How to Lie with Statistics</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TCG3X4S">Doctoring Data: How to sort out medical advice from medical nonsense</a>. The only meaningful medical study is a double-blind study measuring all-cause mortality over a significant portion of lifespan. This is almost impossible to do with people for practical reasons, so the best that medicine actually has is animal studies that do this. The only part of modern medicine that actually works well is emergency care because this is the one area where outcomes can be quickly and accurately measured.</p>
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20 <p>Why does modern medicine misuse reductionism? Because modern culture itself misuses reductionism generally. Blame Plato and rationalism for this. A combination of too much faith in deductive reason with a lack of humility which causes one to make unjustified assumptions is what allows reductionism to be applied where it shouldn't be.</p>
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22 <p>Religion tends to be holistic. Religions basically tell you that if you generally follow the religion then things will turn out better. Religions don't try to isolate cause and effect. And religion is right to do this because societies are even more complex systems than the human body is.</p>
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24 <p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture">nature versus nurture</a> question is reductionist. This question can be answered to some degree by looking at adopted siblings, especially identical twins. But my concern about this is what practical value does this question have? For children raised by their biological parents, the children get both nature (genes) and nurture (childhood environment) from the parents. So distinguishing between nature and nurture in this case is pointless. In contrast, for children not raised by their biological father, only the father's genes count, not his nurture/culture. But as <a href="/about.html#dysgenics">I have explained</a>, this is dysgenic, so good societies will mostly prevent this from happening. So the conclusion here is that if your goal is to produce a good population, the nature versus nurture question is irrelevant. Just select for good parents and enforce reproductive monogamy.</p>
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26 <p>The word "eugenics" comes from the Greek "of good birth" and is about improving the quality of a human population. If that was the whole idea, I would fully support it. Yes, improve a population by encouraging good people to reproduce more. But the problem is that eugenics only focuses on the nature/genetic component and ignores the nurture/culture component. This is harmful reductionism because it doesn't consider the whole picture. Note that natural selection itself is holistic, selecting the best organisms regardless of the cause of what made them good. Natural selection selects for good nurture/culture just as much as it selects for good genes. The best expression of holistic thinking that I know of is Jesus in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+7%3A16-20&version=HCSB">Matthew 7:16-20</a>.</p>
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