Discovery: Windows on the Life Sciences

Vitalism is a hugely science-ejected concept, though many CAM or 'natural health' cabals claim that vitalism survives scientific scrutiny. Some favorite quotes from this book: "vitalism held that different laws than those underlying chemistry and physics controlled living matter, and this proclamation was enough to stop people from questioning further. But experiments soon showed that living matter is indeed subject to the laws of nature. Throughout the nineteenth century, chemists and physiologists began to chip away at the vague and all-encompassing veil of vitalism [...e.g.] Wohler challenged the prevailing idea that chemicals that are part of an organism came from a 'vital force.' He synthesized urea [... & ] Berthelot synthesized many carbon-containing chemicals, some identical to those in organisms [...] early physiologists also took a rational approach to replacing vitalism with demonstrations of the physical causes of biological functions [...therein,] ultimately, experiments buried vitalism [p.026]."