Nothing Special About Specialization
By Arjuna Seneviratne -
Arjuna Seneviratne
July 17, 2013
Everyone knows that a tree is an organism that is standing on its head. A very large percentage of tree species absorbs nutrients through their roots and excretes oxygen and water vapor through stomata in their leaves. The tree of knowledge is no different. However, we, in our collective madness have done something rather shocking with it. We have, to all intents and purposes, decided that *yuck*, no self respecting organism should identify as its “head” something that is buried in the ground and instead, we have, over the last century or so, valiantly attempted to legitimize the case for calling it’s excretory organ its intake organ. We have tried to re-label its backside as its mouth.
Let me explain. Despite the fact that knowledge, by its very definition should be an all encompassing whole, we concluded that we could become “knowledgeable” by acquiring fact-nuggets selectively. This is the result of a fact of science which proposes, aggressively promotes and teaches us that everything can be broken down into their component pieces, studied in a mutually disassociated state, deductively or inferentially linked together through analysis and understood as a whole. The rationale stems,as Thom Hartmann says, from thinking such as this: If you break a car into its component parts, you can understand exactly how it works and if you put it back together it will come back alive. However, and here is the fallacy of that argument, if you do that to a dog, regardless of how competent a surgeon one is, once one puts it back together it will remain dead. Something very essential to the idea of the living dog, the whole of it existence is lost in the process of dismembering it. As a matter of fact, when attempting to understand systems that exist dependent on the right juxtaposition of a very large number or even an infinite number of parameters (such as a living being, an ecosystem, a social group, a nation etc.), breaking things down has only one practical outcome – it breaks them.
