Quetzal

I just KNEW someone would post this.

The_Gorgonzola

With a noise like a hundred thousand people saying whop...

Gorgo

Camaban

Both of which would be ignored (unless no place was found which had *exactly* the right residues) and all that would be pointed was that it took an extremely intelligent team of scientists to manage it.

lpetrich

Thanx, guys.

I wonder how Jonathan Wells's views on developmental biology might be called vitalistic.

But it is interesting that creationists and IDers tend to implicitly accept the mechanistic paradigms of biochemistry and molecular biology, paradigms which feature not a trace of some "vital force" or life-stuff. This is evident from all the "life is too complex to evolve naturally" arguments, as if there was no special life-stuff to be added.

IIRC, Dr. Isaac Asimov once claimed that vitalism could actually be scientifically convenient -- one would detect living things by detecting their life-stuff. But no positive evidence for life-stuff has ever been found.

Mind-body dualism or separable-soulism may be called a hypothesis of some special mind-stuff or consciousness-stuff or soul-stuff, and you people are right that it is a vitalism-like hypothesis. However, it has been going the way of vitalism, being discredited as brain/mind research progresses.

I note in passing an interesting historical view, that of Aristotle, who believed that there are three kinds of soul, the vegetable soul, present in all living things, the animal soul, present in the animal kingdom, and the rational soul, present in our species. In effect, this was three kinds of life-stuff, one responsible for growth and nutrition, one responsible for sensing and movement, and one responsible for reason.