From the Atom to Living Systems: A Chemical and Philosophical Journey Into Modern and Contemporary Science

The scope of this book is to use a historico-epistemological approach to follow the passage, in the microscopic analysis of reality, from the atomic to the molecular and then macromolecular levels. This scientific journey has important philosophical consequences that will constitute an integral part of this book. This book can be framed within the sectors of systems science and of the so-called sciences of complexity, which are areas that are fundamental for 21st century science. In fact, the possibility of studying and understanding the material world through levels of complexity (atomic, molecular, macromolecular, cellular, etc.) opens a great philosophical space that proposes to provide systemic and complex explanations, rather reductionistic explanations that ultimately pretend to account for all phenomena through the interactions of elementary particles, while considering everything implicit and deterministic. The systemic and complex approach implies substituting unique top-down explanations, which move exclusively from the microscopically simple to the macroscopically complex, with a series of explanations that are horizontal (within the planes of complexity), vertically top-down, vertically bottom-up (between various planes of complexity), and circular, that render all levels of reality and the disciplines that study these levels both autonomous and interconnected.