Reductionism And Systems Thinking: Complementary Scientific Lenses

I'm sure many of you have heard the old story about a group of blind men trying to describe an elephant.  One guy grabs the elephant's leg and says an elephant must be like a tree.  Another guy grabs the end of its tail and says it's like a woman's ponytail.  Another one catches a breeze from the elephant's flapping ear and says the creature is more like a large fan.  (Okay, obviously I don't remember the details of the story, but you get the picture.)  One of the places I heard this story in detail was in a course on Indian Philosophies, and it was used as a way of describing the difficulty any one person will have in understanding the whole of reality. read more

Read the whole article on

More from