There is no way to do science without reduction at some stage. The material relationships alone, found within living things and earthly systems, are so phenomenally complex that they must be broken down in order to even take peek at them, but science wrongly assumes that what has already been accepted cannot be integrated, and then fine tuned. Lovelock merely put the life sciences back together, to gain a glimpse of the whole picture. The truth will only be found in the big picture and even then unified conceptual clarity must undergo continual revision based upon new levels of understanding in every field. In his pieceentitled, Systeme de la nature , d'Holbach suggests that man is unhappy because he is ignorant of nature.
Nature makes men neither good nor evil but malleable by education and experience.
I think that we should go back to the beginning and rethink our position. From within my perceptions as a child then, here are a few of my historical attempts at rational thought. The concrete tangibility of our sense data varies greatly depending upon the context under which an object is perceived. So goes it with our experiential reality. Our immediate reality is the direct result of what we perceive when we perceive it.