Reflections on a Theory of Organisms: Holism in BiologyAre living organisms as Descartes argued just machines? Or is the nature of life such that it can never be fully explained by mechanistic models? In this thought provoking and controversial book, eminent geophysicist Walter M. Elsasser argues that the behavior of living organisms cannot be reduced to physico chemical causality. Suggesting that molecular biology today is at the same point as Newtonian physics on the eve of the quantum revolution,