On the decomposition of a dynamical system into non-interacting subsystems.

It is shown that, under rather general conditions, it is possible to formally decompose the dynamics of an n-dimensional dynamical system into a number of non-interacting subsystems. It is shown that these decompositions are in general not simply related to the kinds of observational procedures in terms of which the original state variables of the system are defined. Some consequences of this construction for reductionism in biology are discussed.