The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

the biological version of the ‘spiritual soul’, Aristotle is a vitalist. To be a vitalist is to suppose that living things have some property that cannot be found in, or derived from, inanimate matter; to deny that living things are really just very complicated machines; to believe in the autonomy of life. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a battle raged – particularly in Germany – between biologists and philosophers who thought that living things are just machines and those who did not. The latter were invariably impressed by the very thing that so impressed Aristotle: the goal-directness of living things. Teleology was an invitation to fill the explanatory vacuum with resounding, if empty, phrases: nisus formatus, Bildungsreib, Lebenskraft, vis vitalis, vis essentialis and the like. The last scientist of any repute to wear the vitalist badge proudly was Hans Driesch (1867–1941). A brilliant experimentalist in his youth, one of the founders of Entwicklungsmechanik – experimental embryology – in middle age he abandoned mechanistic theory and became a committed vitalist, arguing that no machine could even in principle construct a living thing. ‘But this may mean no more than that the living machine is more complex than any that Driesch has in mind,’ was Edward Conklin’s sardonic quip in 1914, and now Driesch is known, if at all, only as an object lesson on the perils of abandoning the lab bench for the airy realms of philosophy. In an unfortunate homage to Aristotl...