In contrast, "elan vital" doesn't make any predictions. It doesn't drive curiosity because there's no way to test it and get results that we can then try to understand better.

Honestly, how much direct familiarity do you have with the actual historical vitalist theories, as opposed to third- or fourth-hand strawman accounts peppered with a few convenient soundbites, such as the one presented in the original post here?

One of the worst tendencies often seen on LW is the propensity to thrash these ridiculous strawmen instead of grappling with the real complexity of the history of ideas. Yes, historical scientific theories like vitalism and phlogiston have been falsified, but bashing people who held them centuries ago as dimwits who sought to mysticize the questions instead of elucidating them is sheer arrogant ignorance.

Even the original post itself lists an example where vitalism (i.e. its strong version) made concrete predictions that could be falsified, and which were indeed falsified by Woehler's experiments. Another issue where (weaker) vitalism made falsifiable predictions that lead to hugely important insight was the question of the spontaneous generation of microorganisms (and molds etc.). It was a vitalist model that motivated Pasteur's experiments that demonstrated that such generation does not occur and thus sterilized stuff remains such once sealed.

Yes, of course, nowadays we know better than all of these people, but bashing them is as silly as taking a sophomore course in relativity and then jeering at Galileo and Newton as ignorant idiots.

Edit: For those interested in the real history of vitalism rather than strawmen, here is a nice article:
http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/philbio/vitalism.htm