I was raised into and trained in reductionism: the ideology that the best way to understand something is to understand its parts. In the 90s, I got interested in systems theory (I’d guess that Jurassic Park’s complexity theory and Kevin Kelly’s writing in Wired magazine were early influences). Systems theory says that when you combine the parts of something, properties emerge that are not obvious (or even knowable) from examining the parts on their own.

One of the key beliefs of systems theory is that evolution tends toward higher complexity. Humans aren’t the end product of evolution, nor has evolution been building towards humans specifically, but something like humans is seen as inevitable.

In fact, biologists will tell you that evolution tends toward diversity. Over time, you’ll end up with organisms that are both more and less complex – both humans and prions. There are far more species of single-celled organisms than multi-celled organisms (although “species” is a fuzzy concept without sex), presumably because many more combinations of single-celled DNA are viable. Natural selection has, in some cases, resulted in lower complexity, like how simians can’t synthesize vitamin C. (This argument is based on Wikipedia’s page on evolution of complexity.)

From a postmodern perspective, systems theory is the modernist metanarrative of progress in a sciency wrapper. But even reductionist science has been infected by the progress metanarrative – scientists frequently give support to things like social Darwinism.

Systems theory is not really criticism of science itself, it’s a criticism of the paradigms governing many scientific disciplines (an overarching paradigm or a metaparadigm?). Like any scientific paradigm shift, it’s more of an evolution of the worldview than the revolution that I originally mistook systems theory for.