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Reductionism represents an intellectually-bankrupt approach to the understanding of brain-behaviour "In a generation's time most of the researchers in psychology departments will be working on molecular psychology." Francis Crick, 7th European Conference on Visual Perception. Reduction refers to the explanation of a theory by a more basic, fundamental one. It is best exemplified by the unification and increased coherence made possible by the kinetic theory of gases. This succeeded in explaining hitherto mysterious macroscopic phenomena by reducing gases to swarms of microscopic atoms whose behaviour is governed by Newton's (1642-1727) laws and laws of statistics, thus incorporating an independent, isolated scientific system into a single, more comprehensible and powerful framework. So the reduction of theories augments our understanding in a special way, producing a single picture of Nature. In many fields reductionism has proved worthwhile. Biophysics and molecular biology explicitly use physical methods, with the discovery of the molecular structure of the gene...

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