Harvard biologist, and two-time Pulitzer-Prize winner, Edward O. Wilson, in his 1998 book Consilience, stated that "the cutting edge of science is reductionism, the breaking apart of nature into its natural constituents." The journal Nature, in 1997, defined reductionism as the search "to explain the wide variety of natural phenomena by the behavior of limited numbers of simpler constituents subject to rigorous and simple laws."

A reductionist approach has been perhaps most successful in molecular biology, which, one author has argued "constitutes a research program that attempts to explain and understand biological systems completely in terms of the physical interactions of their parts." Reductionism in molecular biology has led to many advances in explaining the molecular basis, most spectacularly, of human disease, but also to sometimes startling advances in such fields as immunology and developmental biology.

Still, considerable debate has raged over the merits of reductionism. E.O. Wilson's ascendant...