Some biologists of the time believed in vitalism—the idea that living organisms were not subject to the same laws of physics as inanimate matter, that there was something nonphysical in cell division and inheritance that defied thermodynamics. The positivists rejected this claim, and others like it, as meaninglessly vague metaphysics. Even philosophy itself was to be subsumed by the unity of science, according to the Vienna Circle manifesto: “There is no such thing as philosophy as a basic or universal science alongside or above the various fields of the one empirical science.” Philosophy,
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