| Article | Susan Oyama, Biologists Behaving Badly: Vitalism and the Language of Language |
Abstract | A comparison is made between Biologos, the “language of language” that
predominates in current infocentric biology, and Logos, the classic bringer of form to chaos.
The immaterial information on which Biologos is based is seen to bear intriguing similarities
to just the sort of disembodied formative powers that an aggressively materialist biology has
long derided. I address these issues by meeting a (perhaps only hypothetical) charge that my
own work is in some sense vitalist, first with the usual flat denial, then with a countercharge.
My third move is a nontraditional one, meant not as capitulation or acquiescence, but as an
acknowledgement that the terms of this debate, never clear, continue to be remarkably illdefined.
The question of how best to think about development, or epigenesis – the process
whereby organisms come into being – remains a legitimately contested and difficult one.
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Keywords | Essentialism, preformationism, vitalism, developmental systems theory,
information, epigenesis
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