Except for natural selection, generally speaking reductionism has the advantage over holism that it describes a direction in which causality is likely to make sense. Correlation is indeed not enough from which to infer causation by itself, but good practical common-sense intuition about the physical world never needed to be rejected by practising physicists.

It's something like the continuing popularity of Platonism among mathematicians.

In any case, the author's reference to the "tribal lay" of science gives the game away: this referenced a famous Kipling quote, "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,\And every single one of them is right!". So no need to get excited.