Science & Tech Quote by Michael Polanyi

Polanyi is drawing a bright line between reduction and understanding, and he does it with the kind of careful, almost lawyerly phrasing that signals a fight with the reigning scientific mood of his era. Biology, he grants, has genuine achievements: it explains how living systems work by uncovering mechanisms whose parts obey physics and chemistry. But then comes the pivot: that is not the same as explaining life in the language of physics and chemistry alone.

The intent is defensive and strategic. Polanyi is protecting biology’s autonomy without lapsing into mysticism. He’s saying: yes, every enzyme, membrane, and signaling pathway is physically instantiated; no, that doesn’t make a cell just a messy chemistry set. The subtext is a critique of mid-20th-century reductionism, the confidence (especially after the triumphs of molecular biology) that “real” explanation means bottoming out at fundamental laws. Polanyi’s counter is that mechanisms are organized: they rely on constraints, hierarchies, and functional relations that aren’t captured by a mere inventory of particles and forces. The mechanism is “founded on” physics and chemistry, but its explanatory punch comes from how those materials are arranged to do something.

Context matters: Polanyi, a scientist turned philosopher of science, was pushing back against both positivist certainty and the political fantasies of total planning. His science argument doubles as a cultural warning. If you treat higher-level patterns as nothing but reducible noise, you miss the very structures that make complex systems intelligible - and, by implication, governable, accountable, and meaning-bearing in human terms.