Making Hands Jive: How the Body Manages Hand Coordination

The world is an untidy place, and the sciences—all of them—refl ect this. One source of this untidiness is the relationship between levels of organization. Reducing macrolevels to microlevels—explaining the former in terms of the latter—has met with successes but has never been the whole story. In the biological sciences, there has been much attention lately to the shortcomings of reductionism on the grounds that (i) it changes the subject rather than explaining, (ii) it leads to a myopically molecular view of the biological world, and (iii) the behavior or behaviors of complex systems are often very poorly predicted based solely on their microproperties. It is just for these reasons that biologists of many stripes have called for a move away from reductionism and toward a new kind of biology for the 21st century. But what shape might this new biology take? A look at the recent literature reveals that the new biology should be mathematical in nature, partly because of needed improvements in modeling the outcomes of interactions between levels of organization [1]. The new biology should be integrative across levels of organization while remaining attentive to differences in kinds and degrees of causal factors [2]. It should also attend to the holistic, nonlinear, and emergent features of the biological world, focusing primarily on " evolution and the nature of biological form " [3]. The new biology should also move " away from a reductionist focus on a limited number of molecular components to a comprehensive understanding of how large numbers of interrelated components of a system comprise modules or networks whose functional properties emerge as defi nable phenotypes " (http://www. systemsbiology.org). Its approaches " should be more integral, multilevel, and dynamic " than they are presently [4]. It should also offer new theoretical insights that help make sense of and integrate the vast amounts of data being produced by biologists in many fi elds [5]. Most of these calls for the wholesale rethinking of biological science are motivated by the successes and failures of molecular biology in the second half of the 20th century. There are already, however, large-scale integrative efforts underway outside of molecular biology that are not reductive, or at least are not reductive in the way that has concerned those who worry about an undue focus on molecules. Recent work on metabolic scaling theory [6) comes to mind as an example, as does the recent …