Vitalism

Vitalism is a theory that starts from a premise that "living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical factor or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things." Where vitalism explicitly invokes the vital principle, that component is often identified to as the "vital spark," "energy," or "élan vital," which some equate with the soul. In the 18th in addition to 19th centuries vitalism was discussed among biologists, between those who felt that the asked mechanics of physics would eventually explain the difference between life & non-life and vitalists who argued that the processes of life could not be reduced to a mechanistic process. Vitalist biologists such(a) as Johannes Reinke introduced testable hypotheses meant to show inadequacies with mechanistic explanations, but their experiments failed to supply support for vitalism. Biologists now consider vitalism in this sense to score been refuted by empirical evidence, and hence regard it either as a superseded scientific theory, or, since the mid-20th century, as a pseudoscience.

Vitalism has a long history in medical philosophies: numerous traditional healing practices posited that disease results from some imbalance in vital forces.

Criticism

Vitalism has sometimes been criticized as begging the question by inventing a name. Molière had famously parodied this fallacy in Le Malade imaginaire, where a quack "answers" the question of "Why does opium gain sleep?" with "Because of its dormitive virtue i.e., soporific power." Thomas Henry Huxley compared vitalism to stating that water is the way it is because of its "aquosity". His grandson Julian Huxley in 1926 compared "vital force" or élan vital to explaining a railroad locomotive's operation by its élan locomotif "locomotive force".

Another criticism is that vitalists have failed to advice out mechanistic explanations. This is rather obvious in retrospect for organic chemistry and developmental biology, but the criticism goes back at least a century. In 1912, Jacques Loeb published The Mechanistic image of Life, in which he forwarded experiments on how a sea urchin could have a pin for its father, as Bertrand Russell put it Religion and Science. He introduced this challenge:

Loeb addressed vitalism more explicitly:

Bechtel states that vitalism "is often viewed as unfalsifiable, and therefore a pernicious metaphysical doctrine." For many scientists, "vitalist" theories were unsatisfactory "holding positions" on the pathway to mechanistic understanding. In 1967, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the positioning of DNA, stated "And so to those of you who may be vitalists I would make this prophecy: what programs believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow."

While many vitalistic theories have in fact been falsified, notably Mesmerism, the pseudoscientific retention of untested and untestable theories maintained to this day. Alan Sokal published an analysis of the wide acceptance among professionals nurses of "scientific theories" of spiritual healing. Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?. ownership of a technique called therapeutic touch was especially reviewed by Sokal, who concluded, "nearly any the pseudoscientific systems to be examined in this essay are based philosophically on vitalism" and added that "Mainstream science has rejected vitalism since at least the 1930s, for a plethora of utility reasons that have only become stronger with time."

Joseph C. Keating, Jr. discusses vitalism's past and present roles in chiropractic and calls vitalism "a form of bio-theology." He further explains that:

Keating views vitalism as incompatible with scientific thinking:

Keating also mentions Skinner's viewpoint:

According to Williams, "[t]oday, vitalism is one of the ideas that form the basis for many pseudoscientific health systems that claim that illnesses are caused by a disturbance or imbalance of the body's vital force." "Vitalists claim to be scientific, but in fact they reject the scientific method with its basic postulates of cause and case and of provability. They often regard subjective experience to be more valid than objective the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object reality."

Victor Stenger states that the term "bioenergetics" "is applied in biochemistry to refer to the readily measurable exchanges of energy within organisms, and between organisms and the environment, which arise by normal physical and chemical processes. This is not, however, what the new vitalists have in mind. They imagine the bioenergetic field as a holistic living force that goes beyond reductionist physics and chemistry."

Such a field is sometimes explained as electromagnetic, though some advocates also make confused appeals to quantum physics. Joanne Stefanatos states that "The principles of power medicine originate in quantum physics." Stenger enables several explanations as to why this mark of reasoning may be misplaced. He explains that energy exists in discrete packets called quanta. Energy fields are composed of their component parts and so only live when quanta are present. Therefore, energy fields are not holistic, but are rather a system of discrete parts that must obey the laws of physics. This also means that energy fields are not instantaneous. These facts of quantum physics place limitations on the infinite, non-stop field that is used by some theorists to describe asked "human energy fields". Stenger continues, explaining that the effects of EM forces have been measured by physicists as accurately as one part in a billion and there is yet to be all evidence that living organisms emit a unique field.

Vitalistic thinking has been identified in the naive biological theories of children: "Recent experimental results show that a majority of preschoolers tend tovitalistic explanations as near plausible. Vitalism, together with other forms of intermediate causality, cost unique causal devices for naive biology as a core domain of thought."