According to the internet, “elan vital” was coined by Henri Bergson, but his “Creative Evolution” book is aware of this critique of vitalism, and asserts that the term “vital principle” is to be understood as a question to be answered (what distinguishes life from non-life?). He gives the “elan vital”/”vital impetus” as an answer to the question of what the vital principle is.
Roughly speaking[1], he proposes viewing evolution as an entropic force, and so argues that natural selection does not explain the origin of species, but that rather the origin of species must be understood in terms of the different macrostates that are possible. The macrostate itself is the “elan vital” (and can differ by species), though of course the actual macrostate is distinct from the set of possible macrostates, which is determined by the environment and something that he calls the “original impetus”.
A central example he uses is eyes. He argues that light causes the possibility of vision, which causes eyes; and that different functions of vision (e.g. acquiring food) cause the eyes to have varying degrees of development (from eyespots to highly advanced eyes).[2]
The meaning of the original impetus is less clear than the meaning of the vital impetus. He defines the original impetus as something that was passed in the germ from the original life to modern life, and which explains the strong similarity across lifeforms (again bringing up how different species have similar eye structures). I guess in modern terms the original impetus would be closely related to mitosis and transcription.
(The book was released prior to the discovery of DNA as the unit of heredity, but after the Origin of Species. Around the time the central dogma of molecular biology was becoming a thing.)
… This description of his view actually makes me wonder if the rationalist community has been unfair to Beff Jezos’ assertion that increasing entropy is the meaning of life.
Using my terminology, not his. YMMV about whether it is actually accurate, though a more relevant point is that he goes in depth about the need to understand things, and basically doesn’t support mysterious answers to mysterious questions at all. He merely opposes complex answers to simple questions.
This is in contrast to our modern standard model of evolution, namely Fisher’s infinitesimal model combined with natural selection, which would argue that random mutations increase the genetic variance in presence of photoreceptiveness of cells, number of photoreceptive cells, etc., which increases the genetic variance in sight, and which in turn increases the genetic variance in fitness, which then gradually selects for eyes. Henri Bergson argues this does not explain sight because it doesn’t explain why there are all these different things that could correlate to produce sight. Meanwhile light does explain the presence of these correlations, and so is a better explanation of sight than natural selection is.
According to the internet, “elan vital” was coined by Henri Bergson, but his “Creative Evolution” book is aware of this critique of vitalism, and asserts that the term “vital principle” is to be understood as a question to be answered (what distinguishes life from non-life?). He gives the “elan vital”/”vital impetus” as an answer to the question of what the vital principle is.
Roughly speaking[1], he proposes viewing evolution as an entropic force, and so argues that natural selection does not explain the origin of species, but that rather the origin of species must be understood in terms of the different macrostates that are possible. The macrostate itself is the “elan vital” (and can differ by species), though of course the actual macrostate is distinct from the set of possible macrostates, which is determined by the environment and something that he calls the “original impetus”.
A central example he uses is eyes. He argues that light causes the possibility of vision, which causes eyes; and that different functions of vision (e.g. acquiring food) cause the eyes to have varying degrees of development (from eyespots to highly advanced eyes).[2]
The meaning of the original impetus is less clear than the meaning of the vital impetus. He defines the original impetus as something that was passed in the germ from the original life to modern life, and which explains the strong similarity across lifeforms (again bringing up how different species have similar eye structures). I guess in modern terms the original impetus would be closely related to mitosis and transcription.
(The book was released prior to the discovery of DNA as the unit of heredity, but after the Origin of Species. Around the time the central dogma of molecular biology was becoming a thing.)
… This description of his view actually makes me wonder if the rationalist community has been unfair to Beff Jezos’ assertion that increasing entropy is the meaning of life.
Using my terminology, not his. YMMV about whether it is actually accurate, though a more relevant point is that he goes in depth about the need to understand things, and basically doesn’t support mysterious answers to mysterious questions at all. He merely opposes complex answers to simple questions.
This is in contrast to our modern standard model of evolution, namely Fisher’s infinitesimal model combined with natural selection, which would argue that random mutations increase the genetic variance in presence of photoreceptiveness of cells, number of photoreceptive cells, etc., which increases the genetic variance in sight, and which in turn increases the genetic variance in fitness, which then gradually selects for eyes. Henri Bergson argues this does not explain sight because it doesn’t explain why there are all these different things that could correlate to produce sight. Meanwhile light does explain the presence of these correlations, and so is a better explanation of sight than natural selection is.