Abstract
The vitalism-mechanism controversy was a preoccupation of Niels Bohr’s father, a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen, and a frequent topic of discussion at the family residence. Although the terms are now archaic, the distinction between a living organism, which must interact with its environment, and a detailed scientific description of that organism, which must treat the system as isolated or isolatable, remains ambiguous. Bohr dealt with fundamental ambiguities in biology the same way that he dealt with fundamental ambiguities in quantum physics—analyze the conditions for observation required for unambiguous description and avoid appeals to extra-scientific or metaphysical constructs.1
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Referecnes
See Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge
Niels Bohr, `Biology and Atomic Physics,“ in Ibid., pp. 20–1
Niels Bohr, “Light and Life,” in Interrelations: The Biological and Physical Sciences, ed. Robert Blackburn ( Chicago: Scott Foresman, 1966 ), p. 112.
Charles Darwin, “The Linnean Society Papers,” in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Philip Appleman ( New York: Norton, 1970 ), p. 83.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species( New York: Mentor, 1958 ), p. 75.
Darwin, Ibid., p. 120.
lbid., p. 29.
Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years from Our Microbial Ancestors (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 16.
lbid., p. 18
lbid.
Ibid., p. 19.
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Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos, p. 265.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 83.
Ibid., p. 77.
Ibid., p. 75.
Ibid., p. 76.
Ibid., pp. 78–9.
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Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: Freeman, 1981), p. 163.
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Kafatos, M., Nadeau, R. (2000). The Logic of Nature: Complementarity and the New Biology. In: The Conscious Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1308-6_6
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