We have never been apart: Rediscovering interdependence in order to address the great challenges of the 21st century.

Understanding how we and all other agents on Earth interact and depend on each other may help to build a more sustainable and fairer society.

Tackling modern-day crises: Why understanding multilevel interconnectivity is vital.

Complex crises like the coronavirus pandemic are showing us that modern societies are becoming increasingly unable to live in equilibrium with nature. These crises are the result of multiple causes, which interact at different scales and across different domains. Therefore, investigating their proximate causes is not enough to fully understand them. It is also crucial to take into account the structural factors involved. As concerns the global pandemic, I suggest four levels of analysis: (i) the surface or "proximate" level of the crisis; (ii) the human-environment-animal interface, as pointed out by the One Health approach; (iii) the broader socioeconomic context; and (iv) the deeper or worldview level. Furthermore, I argue that there is the need for a mindset shift if we want to properly trace causality. Much more attention must be given to the study of multilevel connecting patterns and nonlinear mechanisms as the producers of emergent global effects.

Drawing lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic: science and epistemic humility should go together.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific experts advised governments for measures to be promptly taken; they also helped people to understand the situation. They carried out this role in the face of a worldwide emergency, when scientific understanding was still underway. Public scientific disputes also arose, creating confusion among people. This article highlights the importance of experts' epistemic stance under these circumstances. It suggests they should embrace the intellectual virtue of epistemic humility, regulating their epistemic behavior and communication accordingly. In so doing, they would also favour the functioning of the broad network of knowledge-based experts, which is required to properly address all the aspects of the global pandemic.

Could we gain insights from the past? Considerations on the 2015 Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

One of the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine drew inspiration for her research from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Beginning with a brief history of such a research, some remarks are offered on the event. It is argued that two (however interacting) streams of TCM seem to coexist today in China: one that has embraced modernization and another one that has striven to preserve its distinctiveness with respect to entitled to contribute to medical pluralism.

Complexity and the reductionism-holism debate in systems biology.

Reductionism has largely influenced the development of science, culminating in its application to molecular biology. An increasing number of novel research findings have, however, shattered this view, showing how the molecular-reductionist approach cannot entirely handle the complexity of biological systems. Within this framework, the advent of systems biology as a new and more integrative field of research is described, along with the form which has taken on the debate of reductionism versus holism. Such an issue occupies a central position in systems biology, and nonetheless it is not always clearly delineated. This partly occurs because different dimensions (ontological, epistemological, methodological) are involved, and yet the concerned ones often remain unspecified. Besides, within systems biology different streams can be distinguished depending on the degree of commitment to embrace genuine systemic principles. Some useful insights into the future development of this discipline might be gained from the tradition of complexity and self-organization. This is especially true with regards the idea of self-reference, which incorporated into the organizational scheme is able to generate autonomy as an emergent property of the biological whole.