Can we have a comprehensive view of nature if we do not include
an adequate account of consciousness, cognition, and value?
Central to the orthodoxy of reductionist materialism is that
these features of reality are fully explicable in terms of
chemical and physical processes: in some theories they are mere
epiphenomena of these processes; in others they are simply
dismissed as illusions, shown to be so by the great successes of
science. Even those scientists, especially biologists, who
resist a reductionist methodology in which physics becomes the
fundamental science, nevertheless embrace an ontological
reductionism according to which there is nothing more to reality
than material components. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard biologist,
has made this point explicitly: It is not that the methods and
institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material
explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that
we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to
create an apparatus of investig