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Vital Holistic Phenomena and Properties of Living Things
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11333 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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5 / 1986 |
3,243 Words |
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Roger Sperry, With Commentary by Norman Cousins
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Norman Cousins was for many years the editor of Saturday Review. Having overcome serious illness, he now teaches at the UCLA Medical School, and continues to write and edit with a particular interest in understanding the relations between the mind, the brain, and the body.
DR. SPERRY: Early biologists hoped to find the secret to life in the form of special vital forces that distinguish the living from the nonliving, or the animate from the inanimate. When they started looking into living things, however, no special vital forces could be discovered. The longer, the harder, and deeper they looked, the more firmly biologists became convinced that there are no such things in this world as special vital forces. Instead, we concluded that all living things are nothing but physico-chemical processes in different forms and degrees of complexity, and that all life can be explained, in principle, by the laws of physics and chemistry. The idea that there exist any distinct "vital" forces came to be known as the doctrine of "vitalism" and by the 1930s had already become a subject of scorn and derision among nearly all biologists and remains so to this day.
What happened is that we biologists had been searching in the wrong places. You don't look for vital forces among atoms and molecules; you look instead among living things, for example among living cells and organisms acting and interacting as entities. You look, for example, among animals responding to each other, breathing, eating, running, flying, swimming, reproducing, nest building, etc. Among such actions and interactions of living things one finds plenty of evidence for vital phenomena, forces, laws, and properties that are not to be found anywhere among inanimate objects nor among the molecules of which the living are constituted. In other words, the special vital forces that distinguish living things from the nonliving are emergent, holistic properties of the living entities themselves. They are not properties of their physico-chemical components nor can they be fully explained merely in terms of physics and chemistry. This does not mean they are in any way supernatural or mystical. Those who conceived vital forces in supernatural terms were just as wrong as those who denied their existence. These higher, vital holistic phenomena and properties of living things are just as real, just as cause-effective and deserving of scientific recognition, as are the properties and laws of molecules or atoms, or electrons and protons.
When reductionist doctrine tried to tell us that there are no vital forces, just as it also had long taught that there are no mental
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