[On Of Molecules and Men]

Date:
[c.1970]
Reference:
PP/CRI/I/2/6/1
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: [On <i>Of Molecules and Men</i>]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    : for scientific subjects are vitalist, text books are vitalist, a large number of the teachers are vitalist, and vitalism creeps into the daily press, into the popular science literature, into the, messages of mass communication. As for mechanism* in the narrowest sense of the word - historical and etymological - it results from the attempt to apply'models drawn from classical mechanics to biology. But why shouldn't mechanism be used to call that siili eh draws its models from statistical mechanics or quantum mechanics? or perhaps from electronics or any other'branch of science? and inhere much difference, if, as à consequence of biological, research, the pre-existent me thods are modified, or nèw ideas are proposed (natural selection, for example) which biology can then export into totally different fields of research? This is afaormal exchange of information among specialists, and a normal usage of that great heuristic instrument that is the analogy¿ We can continue to call, it mechanism or,, if we prefer, physicism, as did Theodor Schwann 0 , or even - unabashedly,- materialism; keeping in mind that the appeal to physics for progress in the biological explanations doesn't imply a metaphysics of life: it means only assistance from that which we know - rather than that which we believe* or wish, or hope- so that we may study that which we don't know. Vitalism ant^mechani.sm are not two scientific hypotheses that must be veri fied or disproved experimentally; they are two/attitudes to choose from. It is incorrëct to place them on the same planed mechanism^ even with all of its historical errors, is the scientific attitude, and vitalism is not, even though it has sometimes had the historical merit of pointing out the errors of mecha nism. The discussion isjtherefore open. And itjis one thread in the plot woven from a vaster discourse, between men who are searching for a real conjfacj; with things, and men who nourish hope of finding that sciëhce did, after all, con firm what were in reality their intuitive or inherited and popular prejudices; 00 °See p. 18. 00 George laylord Simpson, Meaning of Evolution, Yale University Press New Haven, 1949, p#
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