Imagine looking at your hand, and knowing nothing of cells, nothing of biochemistry, nothing of DNA. You’ve learned some anatomy from dissection, so you know your hand contains muscles; but you don’t know why muscles move instead of lying there like clay. Your hand is just . . . stuff . . . and for some reason it moves under your direction. Is this not magic?
It seemed to me then, and it still seems to me, most probable that the animal body does not act as a thermodynamic engine . . . The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on. Its power of directing the motions of moving particles, in the demonstrated daily miracle of our human free-will, and in the growth of generation after generation of plants from a single seed, are infinitely different from any possible result of the fortuitous concourse of atoms[.]1
[C]onsciousness teaches every individual that they are, to some extent, subject to the direction of his will. It appears, therefore, that animated creatures have the power of immediately applying, to certain moving particles of matter within their bodies, forces by which the motions of these particles are directed to produce desired mechanical effects.2
Modern biologists are coming once more to a firm acceptance of something beyond mere gravitational, chemical, and physical forces; and that unknown thing is a vital principle.3
—Lord Kelvin
This was the theory of vitalism ; that the mysterious difference between living matter and non-living matter was explained by an Élan vital or vis vitalis. Élan vital infused living matter and caused it to move as consciously directed. Élan vital participated in chemical transformations which no mere non-living particles could undergo—Wöhler’s later synthesis of urea, a component of urine, was a major blow to the vitalistic theory because it showed that mere chemistry could duplicate a product of biology.
Calling “Élan vital” an explanation, even a fake explanation like phlogiston, is probably giving it too much credit. It functioned primarily as a curiosity-stopper. You said “Why?” and the answer was “Élan vital!”
When you say “Élan vital!” it feels like you know why your hand moves. You have a little causal diagram in your head that says:
But actually you know nothing you didn’t know before. You don’t know, say, whether your hand will generate heat or absorb heat, unless you have observed the fact already; if not, you won’t be able to predict it in advance. Your curiosity feels sated, but it hasn’t been fed. Since you can say “Why? Élan vital!” to any possible observation, it is equally good at explaining all outcomes, a disguised hypothesis of maximum entropy, et cetera.
But the greater lesson lies in the vitalists’ reverence for the Élan vital, their eagerness to pronounce it a mystery beyond all science. Meeting the great dragon Unknown, the vitalists did not draw their swords to do battle, but bowed their necks in submission. They took pride in their ignorance, made biology into a sacred mystery, and thereby became loath to relinquish their ignorance when evidence came knocking.
The Secret of Life was infinitely beyond the reach of science! Not just a little beyond, mind you, but infinitely beyond! Lord Kelvin sure did get a tremendous emotional kick out of not knowing something.
But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious is to worship your own ignorance.
Vitalism shared with phlogiston the error of encapsulating the mystery as a substance. Fire was mysterious, and the phlogiston theory encapsulated the mystery in a mysterious substance called “phlogiston.” Life was a sacred mystery, and vitalism encapsulated the sacred mystery in a mysterious substance called “Élan vital.” Neither answer helped concentrate the model’s probability density—helped make some outcomes easier to explain than others. The “explanation” just wrapped up the question as a small, hard, opaque black ball.
In a comedy written by Molière, a physician explains the power of a soporific by saying that it contains a “dormitive potency.” Same principle. It is a failure of human psychology that, faced with a mysterious phenomenon, we more readily postulate mysterious inherent substances than complex underlying processes.
But the deeper failure is supposing that an answer can be mysterious. If a phenomenon feels mysterious, that is a fact about our state of knowledge, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. The vitalists saw a mysterious gap in their knowledge, and postulated a mysterious stuff that plugged the gap. In doing so, they mixed up the map with the territory. All confusion and bewilderment exist in the mind, not in encapsulated substances.
This is the ultimate and fully general explanation for why, again and again in humanity’s history, people are shocked to discover that an incredibly mysterious question has a non-mysterious answer. Mystery is a property of questions, not answers.
Therefore I call theories such as vitalism mysterious answers to mysterious questions.
These are the signs of mysterious answers to mysterious questions:
- First, the explanation acts as a curiosity-stopper rather than an anticipation-controller.
- Second, the hypothesis has no moving parts—the model is not a specific complex mechanism, but a blankly solid substance or force. The mysterious substance or mysterious force may be said to be here or there, to cause this or that; but the reason why the mysterious force behaves thus is wrapped in a blank unity.
- Third, those who proffer the explanation cherish their ignorance; they speak proudly of how the phenomenon defeats ordinary science or is unlike merely mundane phenomena.
- Fourth, even after the answer is given, the phenomenon is still a mystery and possesses the same quality of wonderful inexplicability that it had at the start.
1 Lord Kelvin, “On the Dissipation of Energy: Geology and General Physics,” in Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol. ii (London: Macmillan, 1894).
2 Lord Kelvin, “On the Mechanical action of Heat or Light: On the Power of Animated Creatures over Matter: On the Sources available to Man for the production of Mechanical Effect,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 3, no. 1 (1852): 108–113.
3 Silvanus Phillips Thompson, The Life of Lord Kelvin (American Mathematical Society, 2005).
According to the internet, "elan vital" was coined by Henri Bergson, but his "Creative Evolution" book is aware of this critique of vitalism, and asserts that the term "vital principle" is to be understood as a question to be answered (what distinguishes life from non-life?). He gives the "elan vital"/"vital impetus" as an answer to the question of what the vital principle is.
Roughly speaking[1], he proposes viewing evolution as an entropic force, and so argues that natural selection does not explain the origin of species, but that rather the origin of species must be understood in terms of the different macrostates that are possible. The macrostate itself is the "elan vital" (and can differ by species), though of course the actual macrostate is distinct from the set of possible macrostates, which is determined by the environment and something that he calls the "original impetus".
A central example he uses is eyes. He argues that light causes the possibility of vision, which causes eyes; and that different functions of vision (e.g. acquiring food) cause the eyes to have varying degrees of development (from eyespots to highly advanced eyes).[2]
The meaning of the original impetus is less clear than the meaning of the vital impetus. He defines the original impetus as something that was passed in the germ from the original life to modern life, and which explains the strong similarity across lifeforms (again bringing up how different species have similar eye structures). I guess in modern terms the original impetus would be closely related to mitosis and transcription.
(The book was released prior to the discovery of DNA as the unit of heredity, but after the Origin of Species. Around the time the central dogma of molecular biology was becoming a thing.)
... This description of his view actually makes me wonder if the rationalist community has been unfair to Beff Jezos' assertion that increasing entropy is the meaning of life.
Using my terminology, not his. YMMV about whether it is actually accurate, though a more relevant point is that he goes in depth about the need to understand things, and basically doesn't support mysterious answers to mysterious questions at all. He merely opposes complex answers to simple questions.
This is in contrast to our modern standard model of evolution, namely Fisher's infinitesimal model combined with natural selection, which would argue that random mutations increase the genetic variance in presence of photoreceptiveness of cells, number of photoreceptive cells, etc., which increases the genetic variance in sight, and which in turn increases the genetic variance in fitness, which then gradually selects for eyes. Henri Bergson argues this does not explain sight because it doesn't explain why there are all these different things that could correlate to produce sight. Meanwhile light does explain the presence of these correlations, and so is a better explanation of sight than natural selection is.