Holism is a philosophical notion first proposed by Aristotle in the 4th century BC. It states that systems should be studied in their entirety, with a focus on the interconnections between their various components rather than on the individual parts.[1] Our own human bodies rely on complex multi-organism cooperative systems that are larger than the sum of our parts. Had this beautiful idea of collaboration between species taken root (rather than the shift away from holism during the Age of Enlightenment to study individual components as a means of understand a system), modern medicine may have been more advanced than what we have been able to achieve with our focus on dissection science.
It might be a bit uncomfortable to imagine that the ratio between resident microbes and human cells is likely to be one-to-one. [2] We are just as much made of ‘us’ as we are ‘not us’. As this is the case, living in a way that keeps the other half of ourselves happy is a huge factor in determining the health and happiness of our own cells.
1. Aristotle Metaphysics Z.17, 1041b11–331.
2. Sender, R., Fuchs, S. & Milo, R. Preprint on bioRxiv http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/036103 (2015)
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