Vitalism is the age-old idea that living things possess a vital force – some fundamental element that generally does not exist in non-life. As a Darwinian paradigm took hold of the natural sciences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, vitalism fell out of favor. But as writer and teacher Daniel Witt reports on this classic episode of ID The Future from the vault, a willingness to flirt with vitalism seems to be growing in certain scientific circles.
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