The zoology of Babel

Abstract

The European Union, in its calls for projects (an abundant source of funds for the European scientific community), increasingly calls for holistic, integrative, cross-cutting, and ecosystem-based approaches. The scientific community tends to remain reductionistic, also due to overspecialization of journals, or to the compartmentalization of approaches even within the same journal. This leads to a mismatch between what society asks and what science offers. Indeed, science has profited much from reductionism. Complex problems are split into sets of simpler problems that are solved one at a time, then the solutions are assembled and the complex problem is solved. There is a problem, though: it does not work! The whole is more than the sum of the parts. The old philosophers knew it well: analysis must be followed by synthesis! The analytical efficacy of reductionism has led to great scientific advance and it would be unfair to label it as sterile. It is simply not enough. We need also to look at problems from wider perspectives, and connect all their facets into a common, synthetic landscape. Pushed into a corner by rampant reductionism, zoology tried to keep up with the trend and became fragmented into a host of subdisciplines that became increasingly separated from each other. This is witnessed also by the vast array of topics in this journal: surely most readers have little interest in all of the articles of each issue, since the barriers among subdisciplines (from molecular biology to ecology and evolution) are becoming increasingly higher. Not to mention the barriers that divide zoology from the other branches of biology. Science is exposed to a Tower of Babel risk. The scientists who are building the Tower of Knowledge have developed different languages and cannot communicate with each other. Furthermore, they fail to communicate with the rest of society that, indeed, is asking for a change. For instance: we cannot resolve health problems created by bad environmental conditions by curing the proximate causes (the illnesses) with hospitals; the ultimate causes must be removed, bringing the environment back to a healthy state, leading to healthy humans. Medicine is a reductionistic approach to human health, ecology is a holistic approach to the same problem: you cannot have healthy humans if the environment is unhealthy. As simple as that! But, apparently, we are not ready to understand it. Of course this is not a problem that can be solved within a journal. We will continue to publish articles that range from ecology to molecular biology, focusing on animals (and protozoans). However, it might be the case to encourage some progress towards unitary visions. We have the “grand picture”, by the way: it is evolution or, better, ecology and evolution: the change of the individuals (and of their parts) as a response to environmental pressures. In the past, this was called “natural history”, and Darwin (who was eminently a zoologist) labelled himself a naturalist. Today, in addition to zoology, he would have also practiced molecular biology, to solve his “little problems”. After a century of splitting things for ease of analysis, now we need to produce a synthesis, but we lack the conceptual tools to do it, being overwhelmed by the details. Meanwhile, the decision makers ask for widerscoped approaches. The communication between us and them is impaired. Those who promise magic solutions to all problems are the most heard and, if consulted, we usually produce cumbersome essays on our pet topics that, if confronted with the problems of the world, seem almost irrelevant. On one hand, we claim that the world is in peril, while on the other hand we produce...the genome of the banana. I have absolutely nothing against genomics, but the wonderful promises of genomic approaches are crashing against the need of further splitting: now we have proteomics, and metabolomics, and then epigenetics. If a new machine is invented that allows us to perform an operation, we all want it to play with it, and we do things because we have a machine that allows us to do them. It is important, but it is not enough. And all these fragments must be assembled in a way that allows us to see the forest and the trees, and not only the leaves of the trees. Italian Journal of Zoology, 2016, 151–152 Vol. 83, No. 2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/11250003.2016.1189647