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Reductionist Thinking Reaches it Limits

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"The necessary changes are both curricular and institutional. One reason that many doctoral programmes do not adequately serve students is that they are overly specialized, with curricula fragmented and increasingly irrelevant to the world beyond academia. Expertise, of course, is essential to the advancement of knowledge and to society. But in far too many cases, specialization has led to areas of research so narrow that they are of interest only to other people working in the same fields, subfields or sub-subfields. Many researchers struggle to talk to colleagues in the same department, and communication across departments and disciplines can be impossible."

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472261a.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20110421

It would seem reductionist thinking is subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns.

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