Beyond Analytics: Why a Human Being Is More Than a List of Parts

Imagine a lab report about you. It says that, by mass, your body is about 65 percent oxygen, about 18 percent carbon and about 10 percent hydrogen. It lists about 30 trillion cells and sorts them into tissues and organs. Every line in the report is correct. Yet nobody who reads it would say that it describes a person. So what does this kind of description miss? And is the problem the description, or the way we use it?

What does the analytical view see?

The analytical view explains a thing by taking it apart and studying the parts. Applied to a human being, it gives very precise answers. About 99 percent of your body mass is made of only six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus. Most of the oxygen and hydrogen are bound in water.

The cell count is just as precise, and it holds a surprise. In 2016, the researchers Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs and Ron Milo published a new count in the journal PLOS Biology. They that a young adult man of 70 kilograms has about 30 trillion human cells. About 84 percent of them are red blood cells. Most of what you count when you count “your cells” are small, short-lived carriers of oxygen in your blood.

This view has given us almost all of modern medicine. Doctors can measure your blood, find a broken part and repair or replace it. Nothing in this essay argues against that. The question is what the list cannot show.

What does the list leave out?

The list leaves out what the parts do together. The same elements exist in a body a minute after death, in the same amounts. What is gone is the activity. The heart no longer pumps, the cells no longer take in food and oxygen, and the body no longer keeps its temperature at about 37 degrees Celsius. These are processes, not things. You cannot find them by listing parts, because they exist only in the way the parts act on each other.

Philosophers call the belief that a whole can be fully explained by its parts reductionism. In its mild form, it is a method: study the parts first. In its strong form, it says that nothing more is there. The strong form is the one this essay questions. A list of ingredients does not tell you what a meal tastes like, and a list of cells does not tell you how a person lives.

Where does a human being end?

The second gap is less obvious. The analytical view usually draws a line around the body and studies what is inside. But inside you live huge numbers of other organisms. The community of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that live in and on the body is called the microbiome.

For decades, many textbooks and articles said that bacteria in the body outnumber human cells ten to one. Sender, Fuchs and Milo showed that this figure came from a rough estimate made in the 1970s. Their own estimate is about 38 trillion bacteria, most of them in the large intestine. That is about the same number as your own cells. Together these bacteria weigh only about 0.2 kilograms, because bacteria are much smaller than most human cells.

These bacteria do real work for the body. According to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, gut bacteria break down fibre that your own body cannot digest. When they ferment it, they produce short-chain fatty acids, which your body can use as food. They make some B vitamins and vitamin K. They help to train the immune system, and they protect you by competing with harmful bacteria for food and space.

So the line around “you” is not as clear as it looks. A large part of your digestion is done by organisms that are not human. You need them, and they need you.

How far does the connection reach?

The connection does not stop at the skin. Every breath you take brings in oxygen that plants, algae and some bacteria released through photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process in which these organisms use sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen. The carbon in your body came the same way. Plants took it from the air, and you took it from plants, or from animals that ate plants.

This means that the matter in your body is not fixed. It comes in through food, water and air, and it leaves through breath, sweat and waste. Your body keeps its shape and its functions while the material passes through it.

In this sense, a human being is less like a statue and more like a fountain, which keeps its form while the water in it changes. The analogy has a limit. Many parts of you, such as some nerve cells, stay with you for life. But the basic point holds. You depend every minute on a world outside your skin.

Is the analytical view the problem?

It is tempting to end here and say that analysis is cold and holism is wise. That would be unfair. Almost everything in the last three sections was found by analysis. The microbiome became visible when scientists learned to read the DNA of bacteria. The US National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project in 2007 for exactly this work. The old ten-to-one myth was corrected by careful counting, not by a change of attitude.

So the useful conclusion is that analysis and systems thinking need each other. Systems thinking means studying how parts affect each other over time, and how a system depends on its surroundings. Analysis tells you what the parts are. Systems thinking asks what they do together and what they depend on. Each one shows what the other misses.

What changes when you see yourself this way?

Some practical consequences follow. Your health depends partly on organisms you never see. What you eat also feeds the bacteria in your gut, which is one reason fibre matters. And the state of the air, the water and the plants around you is not only an environmental question. It also decides what goes into your own body.

There is also a change in how you think about problems in general. Many problems in health, work and families do not come from one broken part. They come from how parts affect each other. When you look for the one cause, you may fix a part and leave the problem in place. Asking “what is this connected to?” is often the better first question.

The philosopher Alan Watts made a similar point about the straight grids people lay over a curved world. You can read about it in The Wiggliness of the World: Alan Watts on Straight Lines and a Curved Reality. The lab report from the beginning is one such grid. It is accurate and useful. It becomes misleading only when you forget what the report leaves out. A person is also connected to the bacteria inside, the plants outside and the people around them.