From reductionism to reductionism

Neural organization attempts to thwart, at least in part, modern neuroscien tists' tendency to focus reductionistically on ever smaller microsystems. B ut although emphasizing higher levels of systems organization, the authors end up enforcing reductionisms of their own, principally the reduction of t heir domain to the study of invariable normal functioning, without explicit modeling of the deviations that constitute disease states or aging. This r eductionism seriously weakens the authors' claims about the truth of their quantitative models.