Question

describe vitalism

Answer 1

Vitalism is the old scientific belief that living things are living because they contain a soul or a spirit. Aristotle is the most famous vitalist and he thought that things were living because they contained the essence of a spirit. Descartes was the first major challenger of vitalism and has no reduced it to the point that absolutely NO scientific fact supports it. Descartes thought that living things were just living because they are more complex in some or many ways. This is the foundation (or at least a primitive one) of how science views life now: defined by a collection of physical traits.
Descartes principles launched the mechanistic movement of philosophy, which was later accepted by science after the experiments of Wohler. Wohler was able to synthesize urea from inorganic materials, which proved that biological chamicals were not unique to life and therefore life's vital spirit did not exist.
The experiments of Wohler were the first time that this had been proven and science quickly rejected vitalism. Mainstream biological thought now is entirely mechanistic. The foundations of organic chemistry are based on these first experiments that showed that organic chemistry was a science and, even though it did reject vitalism, had proven vitalism false.

Answer 2

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