1 Introduction

Francis H. C. Crick (1916–2004) rose to the podium in the Roosevelt Senior High School auditorium in northern Seattle, Washington, USA, on the night of 24 February, 1966, to pose a simple question: “Is Vitalism Dead?” The entire event was odd. The location was odd: why at a high school and not at a university or scientific institute? The question was odd: historians and philosophers of science believed the mechanism-vitalism debate concluded three decades earlier, with the deaths of the major proponents of vitalism’s third wave, Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson (Allen 2005; Beckner 1959). Why was Crick raising the dead? And Crick’s answer to the question was odd: vitalism thrived, he insisted. Three decades after the debate supposedly ended, a Nobel laureate took to a high school stage to inveigh against a wave of support for vitalism he sensed floating like some airborne virus through the sciences, infecting even the nonspecialist public.

Immediately after the lectures, University of Washington Press asked Crick to expand them into a book. The talks were already a mutation of a lecture Crick delivered to the Cambridge Humanists Society earlier, so it wasn’t difficult for him to repackage them as Of Molecules & Men (publishers believed a title hinting of John Steinbeck would sell more copies in America). In the book, Crick claimed that prominent scientists still called on a phantasmal élan vital that eluded mechanistic explanations woven into biology. Nevertheless, vitalism’s days were numbered, he assured his audience. Molecular biology—Crick’s own research, in other words—was just then in the process of finally winding down that old debate. He issued a warning (again, quite odd considering the commonly held history of vitalism): “And so, to those of you who may be vitalists, I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow” (Crick 1966: 99).

The purpose of this essay is to peel back the layers of Crick’s lecture and subsequent book in order to discover what lay underneath this strange event. Who were the 1950s and 1960s vitalists against whom Crick made these pronouncements? How could vitalists exist in the professional life sciences at all, given that the term “vitalism” was more or less professionally hazardous by the 1960s (Peterson & Hall 2020)? Why did Crick, by then an internationally known pioneer of molecular biology, deliver his speeches in an American high school? What does this event have to tell us about the status of the life sciences mid-century? And, more to the point, what function did Crick’s appellation “vitalism” play in that era, and what significance does it hold in our own?

Though it seems simple on its face, the story here consists of a complex tangle of arguments between Crick and his peers. It was a strange situation wherein physicists and chemists argued for what I term bioexceptionalism, while Crick argued for the reverse. By bioexceptionalism, I mean only an argument about the methodological utility of preserving biological pursuits within their own domains, distinct from physics and chemistry. Whether there are ontological reasons to hold biology as ultimately reducible to physics or not, there are disciplinary reasons to act as if life is special. Put a different way, this attitude—holding in abeyance ontological questions in favor of an anti-reductionist methodological stance—is what I’m deeming bioexceptionalism. It is no means clear that what motivated the advocates for bioexceptionalism in the mid-twentieth century was an ontic commitment to a vital force, entity, or fluid—something essentially unique about the living.

Why do Crick’s moves here regarding vitalism matter? First, because of his stature as a Nobel laureate and champion of the Young Turks sweeping through molecular biology, they were rhetorically persuasive. Crick’s aspersions deflected the critiques of his own reductionism and muted those who advocated for bioexceptionalism. Secondly, by insinuating these individuals were the “cranks” he mocked, Crick indirectly turned the lens of historians and philosophers of science away from investigating these figures and their influences on the life sciences. Thirdly, the existence of Crick’s feared ‘fourth wave of vitalism’ in the mid-twentieth century a half-century after the third wave suggests the reductionistic solutions offered by earlier physiologists (e.g., Jacques Loeb) and geneticists (e.g., H. J. Muller) did not settle the issue earlier. Why, then, should we believe Crick’s solutions settled them mid-century?

Perhaps the most significant reason to focus on Crick’s Of Molecules and Men and the purported ‘fourth wave of vitalism’ is for the window it opens into longer-term trends within academic disciplines. These events reveal in miniature a growing split within the life sciences and between the sciences and academic disciplines not considered sciences. The “two cultures” divide lamented by C. P. Snow in the 1950s accelerated in the next decade. And Crick, in particular, saw in this trend cause for celebration, not regret. The future would replace biological explanations with exclusively physicochemical ones—meaning also that biological functions, including cognition, would be replaced by engineered, synthetic cells and computers. That was, Crick thought, the goal of the sciences and the conclusion (in both senses) of other knowledge traditions, such as what is traditionally known as the arts, literature, humanistic pursuits more generally, and, of course, religion. The vitalist “cranks,” then, stood not only in the way of science but also his vision of a technologically mediated destiny—humanity without the humanities or the arts, and absent much of the social and even the life sciences.

2 Of Molecules and Crick

“It is notoriously difficult to define the word ‘living’,” began Crick in Of Molecules and Men (Crick 1966: 3). Viruses, especially, create a conundrum. They can certainly reproduce—as we in the SARS-CoV-2 era have become only too aware—which should mean they’re living. But they’re not especially multifaceted, not organism-like. What classifies viruses living things has to do with the fact that structurally, viruses are both sufficiently complex and sufficiently ordered at a chemical level. From Crick’s perspective, ordered complexity at the tiniest level acted as the single marker between the living and non-living (Crick 1966: 5). Viruses demonstrate ordered complexity; rocks do not. Paradoxically, Crick also deployed viruses as a reminder that the gap between living and non-living was itself insignificant—crossable, for all intents and purposes. Natural selection excepted, there appeared no principle or law or operation unique to the domain of living things. The ordinary concepts of chemistry and physics could explain viruses and, by extension, all life (Crick 1966: 10). No vital forces necessary.

For Crick, this view comported with the ultimate goal of the field of biology under the new, confident leadership of molecular biologists, like himself: “to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry” (Crick 1966: 10, emphasis in original). And if this was the quest, Crick saw his role in it as two-fold: (1) to reorient the practice of the life sciences around this notion that all living things can be explained through physics and chemistry without reference to uniquely-biological forces, entities, or processes; (2) to undertake this reorientation because, to date, no interesting biological phenomena had yet appeared to discredit that view. The history of science would validate his role in the quest. Ultimately, Crick asserted, this would open up the world of bioengineering.

Yet some enemies remained to vanquish, if he hoped to complete his quest. These enemies belonged to a tribe of vitalists. For Crick, that meant they adhered to a particular creed:

[T]here is some special force directing the growth or the behavior of living systems which cannot be understood by our ordinary notions of physics and chemistry. …there must be something else in a biological system which cannot be included under the heading of physics or chemistry. There must be some sort of force, or some directing spirit—this is the sort of idea that appeals to nonscientists. Scientists on the other hand often prefer to think that there will be extra laws in biological systems which are not included in physics and chemistry (Crick 1966: 16–17).

These beliefs would not stand, according to Crick. History showed all earlier barriers to explaining biological systems in terms of chemical ones had been broken through. And thankfully, the one feature of the living world that didn’t seem amenable to strictly chemical explanations, namely evolution via natural selection, now seemed at least partially reducible to chemistry. Mutations, Crick reminded his audience, were rare-but-consistently-occurring chemical events. Over the eons, very many of these rare-but-consistently-occurring events enabled a set of organisms to fit new environmental conditions. Like one of a nearly infinite set of chemical keys placed at random into a lock, there was always a chance the door could be opened. This had happened so often, in fact, that we could explain all of the living world merely through this process of chemical trial and error. The first gigantic mistake vitalists made, Crick insisted, was to make the living realm seem more complicated than this.

At present, there were but three areas still holding out against physics and chemistry gobbling up the life sciences for good: (a) the borderline between living and non-living; (b) the origins of life; and (c) “consciousness” (Crick 1966: 17). Crick’s work on DNA, RNA—and the Central Dogma linking them in proper order—meant that molecular biology was close to solving (a). He spent much of the second section of his three-part John Danz Lecture, in fact, simply explaining to his audience the coded DNA to protein sequence. This level of understanding, he predicted, would allow bioengineers to assemble living organisms molecule by molecule by the turn of the twenty-first century at the latest. Simply completing this feat—engineering a living cell from non-living parts—would demonstrate two important facts. First, that there was no life/non-life boundary. Secondly, that the conditions of abiogenesis at the origins of life (hold out (b)) were not only plausible but uncomplicated. Consciousness presented a more intimidating problem, Crick admitted. Here he roamed far outside his expertise. Nevertheless, he confidently proclaimed consciousness also just a molecular problem to be solved by computing and, indeed, centered much of the rest of his scientific career around proving this point.Footnote 1 True, Crick conceded, the logical conclusion of these concepts would eventually render humans obsolete. On the way into the twilight, however, humans would get some great entertainment. We would be able to watch two computerized beings interact. How amusing, thought Crick, to pair an android programed for seduction with one programed to be a psychiatrist! “Explosively funny situations” such as these would more than make up for the sudden redundancy of humans and the concomitant realization that most of what humans valued about themselves turned out not to be important after all (Crick 1966: 83).

3 Decoding Crick’s Depiction of Vitalism

University of Edinburgh developmental biologist C. H. Waddington took it upon himself to review Of Molecules and Men for Nature. That Waddington of all people would write the most prominent review makes sense: Crick had been a long acquaintance of Waddington’s. More than that, Waddington pushed to write the review when he saw Crick veering beyond scientific claims, dabbling in the sorts of philosophy of biology that Waddington made a professional pursuit. “No Vitalism for Crick,” Waddington’s piece, came off less harshly than most of the reviews of Of Molecules and Men. Manhattan Project physicist Eugene Wigner, for instance, praised Crick for his lucid description of the DNA to RNA process but found the rest of the text dismissible at best (Wigner 2001). Waddington, by contrast, put Crick’s claims into serious conversation with the longer-term discussion of the history of vitalism. Was there a wave of vitalism in the 1960s? Waddington thought Crick’s formulation too sloppy to tell.

For him to attack vitalism, charged Waddington, Crick would have to be clearer on the implications of his definition of physics and the relationship of that physics to biology. Crick supposed physics was relatively solid. Waddington noted the strange behavior of particles and energies at the quantum level—something not predicted or even predictable in the physics of the nineteenth century, for instance—and doubted Crick’s supposition. “If biologists should find it necessary to postulate an entity as odd as a quark, would that be vitalistic or not?” queried Waddington. If there was vitalism, Crick conflated two different varieties of it, Waddington warned. “Objective vitalists” claimed that there is something mysterious about living things, such that their behavior could not be fully explicated by any purely physical system. Waddington doubted if many of these sorts of vitalists existed in science anymore. “Subjective vitalists,” however, focused on the gap between any description of consciousness or awareness or mind and the experience of it. Descriptions of neurons and their interconnections existed in a “different logical realm” from the subjective human experience; that much was “irrefutable,” thought Waddington. Crick merely set up a straw argument when equating this realization of subjectivity with older notions of the soul quickening the human fetus.

“The only differences between us are matters of emphasis,” Crick insisted to Waddington in private correspondence.Footnote 2 Though, he also admitted that his lack of philosophical training in or appreciation for philosophy meant that he had “never really thought about [these issues] in detail”—apparently even whilst delivering lectures and writing books about them. A month had transpired since Waddington’s “very friendly review” appeared in Nature, and Crick had decided to sit down and more carefully consider his own claims. Vitalists, Crick decided, could really be divided into three camps. The “obvious sort” believed in souls irreducible to physics and chemistry. Crick really disliked this group, but belatedly admitted they were different than those who he attacked in the book. It was the second group, the “biotonic laws” group, that troubled Crick the most. Physicist Walter Elsasser fit into this category, though Crick admitted that he hadn’t really read the recent works by Elsasser that Waddington referenced in his review. Waddington’s treatment of Elsasser certainly made Elsasser’s position into something stronger than Crick’s strawman version of him, Crick admitted. The third group of vitalists, according to Crick, centered around Max Delbruck—a discovery that Crick had just made and that astonished him. Imagine, Delbruck a vitalist! These sorts of vitalists, if they deserved that appellation at all, thought biological investigations would reveal new laws in physics and chemistry. Crick seriously doubted those sorts of claims, too. Did he have evidence for it? Not really. But he doubted it, nonetheless. What would Waddington say to that?

The real problem with Of Molecules and Men, responded Waddington, had to do with the way Crick and others formulated the vitalism/mechanism dichotomy.Footnote 3 As formulated, the question being asked was: Starting with a foundation of modern physics and chemistry, would we be able to account for biology? Those who said ‘yes’ were said to be mechanists; those who said ‘no’ were dubbed vitalists. But that was the wrong formulation of the problem, according to Waddington. Instead, one should start by asking whether, beginning with whole systems in biology, we would find anything that physics and chemistry might not eventually accommodate—recognizing that physics and chemistry were evolving disciplines, just like biology. There were two features of biology that physics and chemistry could not deal with at present, Waddington suspected. The first, as Crick also noted, was natural selection. But the second, not of much interest to Crick nor, Waddington suspected, to other molecular biologists, was the process of development. This is the field of inquiry once situated in the old field of morphology. To Waddington—who specialized in paleontology and embryology alongside of philosophy before moving into genetics—development was still the most vexing problem. Concepts like natural selection and development remained far removed from what bare-bones physics and chemistry presently had the power to explain, asserted Waddington. Of course, that didn’t mean that physics and chemistry would never accommodate these foundational features of biology, just that they could not now. This was precisely Elsasser’s point, Waddington reminded Crick. Years later, Waddington would clarify the problem with Crick’s reductionism:

The real snag of reductionism, it seems to me, arises if you suppose that we really know all there is to be known about the physical entities and laws. … I was taught that molecules were made up of little groups of atoms which stick together with valency bonds, like little hooks sticking out of them …. This left absolutely no possibility of the very large scale protein molecules with their tertiary structure and allosteric behavior…. That concept didn’t occur forty years ago … it’s been added on since. You must, I think, always realise that we don’t know all about the basic physical entities … (Waddington 1972: 30).

Crick didn’t bother to answer Waddington’s challenge. Perhaps by then, he’d moved on to discussions of astrobiology, among other things. Waddington invited him to contribute to the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) meetings held in Lake Como, Italy, and Crick attended—he loved the Italian vistas. But reports from those philosophically robust meetings show Crick didn’t contribute much to the discussions (Waddington 1970). We can discern his feelings, however, from his behavior immediately after. Among the more influential ideas to emerge from that year’s IUBS theoretical biology meeting was Lewis Wolpert’s “tricolor flag” model of embryonic development across gradients. Crick went after this model in 1970, attempting to discredit it (Crick 1970).Footnote 4 Despite much talking about big concepts, Crick never felt quite comfortable really diving into analytical philosophy of biology. Perhaps he felt, given his list of enemies to vanquish, he never needed to.

4 Identifying Crick’s Vitalist Enemy

Crick dismissed as “the obvious sort” of vitalist folks like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard was an astute, geologically trained Jesuit priest who was on the 1929 team that discovered “Peking Man” (H. erectus pekinensis). But he had also been influenced by the work of vitalist Henri Bergson (Aczel 2007). Teilhard regarded evolution as fully teleological, a slow unfolding toward an Omega Point with humans as a key component of the creation shaping God’s progressive vision: “The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire” (Teilhard de Chardin 2002: 87). Teilhard’s vitalism wasn’t so much an additive force or an entelechy as an overall condition of existence. “A directing spirit,” as Crick dubbed it (1966:16).

On the one hand, “obvious” vitalism like Teilhard’s was not worth taking seriously. On the other, Crick suspected more than a whiff of Christianity—however heterodox Teilhard’s faith appeared to a religious insider—wafted through all versions of “obvious” vitalism. And it was railing against Christianity that both energized Crick and made it difficult for him to find common ground with religious thinkers or institutions. As he wrote to the editor of Cambridge University’s Varsity magazine, “In the past, religion answered these [enduring] questions, often in considerable detail. Now we know that almost all these answers are highly likely to be nonsense….”Footnote 5 The biology of Darwin and Mendel had already scrubbed this sort of thinking out of real science, Crick asserted.

But what about the other two kinds of vitalism? As a representative of the third type of vitalist, Crick could only identify Max Delbruck. As Delbruck was an insider, a founding figure of molecular biology, in fact, and as Delbruck claimed he found no in principle barrier between physics and biology, Crick turned away from attacking him.

The most bothersome version of vitalism, from Crick’s point of view, was the second type—the “biotonic laws” version. Waddington affirmed that Walter Elsasser acted as a reasonable figurehead for this group, though he didn’t dismiss this group as Crick did. On the surface, Crick’s complaint was that Elsasser didn’t understand biology. Underneath the bravado, however, Crick must have seen that Elsasser represented something very disconcerting. If Crick’s major goal was to reduce biology to chemistry and physics, what did it mean when a physicist denied that physics had the power to accommodate the reduction?

Walter Elsasser (1904–1991) migrated from particle physics to geophysics to biology over the course of his career, achieving notoriety in the first two fields as a faculty member of prestigious universities from coast to coast in the United States. But aside from determining the physics at work in the earth’s generation of a magnetic field, he felt his most important achievements were in theoretical biology. Elsasser dedicated the last four decades of his life attempting to hammer out the very relationship between physics and biology that Crick proclaimed to be his own ultimate quest. And, though, Elsasser definitely believed he was not advocating for vitalism, his concept of biotonic laws definitely rubbed practicing biologists the wrong way.

Biotonic laws, as advocated by Elsasser, was merely the idea that governing principles in biology are more expansive than the existing laws known to physics. He began promoting this concept in The Physical Foundation of Biology: An Analytical Study, the work that raised Crick’s hackles (Elsasser 1958). The concept highlighted two bones of contention. The first one was obvious: Elsasser did not regard the ‘ordered heterogeneity’ of organisms as reducible to any physical process currently understood. The number of biochemicals arranged by cells was already large, and the ways in which they could be arranged to make a biological object like a cell was incomprehensible—a number larger than the number of stars. For example, something like 1080 particles are thought to exist in the observable universe. Around one thousand genes regulate the production of penicillin in Aspergillus, however. Imagining only two states of those genes—normal or mutated—the number of possible genetic combinations leaps to roughly 10300—a clear indication of the possible heterogeneity of living things at the biochemical level (Rubin 1998: xiv). The question now becomes how this possible heterogeneity can be organized in precise ways to produce biological products that perform a range of specific functions when in the context of an organism. This is what R. D. Hotchkiss called the problem of ordered heterogeneity; Elsasser (1998: 39) adopted that terminology.

Crick admitted this, too, with his term “ordered complexity”—what viruses have that rocks do not. Elsasser ran afoul of Crick because of what Elsasser thought that ordered heterogeneity meant. The fact that this heterogeneity at the chemical level could be ordered precisely at the cellular level, and then that ordered heterogeneity passed on from generation to generation almost unaltered did not represent a principle that could be easily excavated from those already discovered in physics or chemistry. (In his elucidation of this point, Elsasser repeated the postulates of Niels Bohr (1933), for instance, who advocated complementarity in biology as well as in the wave-particle duality of light.) What’s more, the inability of biology to cleanly reduce to physics was not merely due to our lack of present knowledge, but a problem of human intellect for as far out as Elsasser could envision. Life, for all intents and purposes, is just too complex to understand in the causal chain from proton to organism. This point, Elsasser claimed, was not calling forth vitalism because he invoked no supernatural intervention, no élan vital, and no entelechy—just really large numbers. Numbers too large, in fact, for any human to elucidate; even a computer-assisted one. Bringing biology down to the lowest physical level was epistemically ridiculous. Crick’s reductionist quest to fit biology to physics, in other words, was not going to work.

More than that, it was unproductive. Elsasser’s second bone of contention with Crick’s reductionism was over what to do in the face of such immense complexity. He maintained that level of complexity meant that the life sciences would continue to draw on a methodology separate from that of physics and chemistry. Life wasn’t limited to the study of molecules. Biology needed to acknowledge the order at the cellular level and above. This kind of holism reflected the only appropriate methodology in the life sciences. In effect, Elsasser argued for the permanent autonomy of biology from the physical and chemical sciences. Not because life was special in the old vitalistic sense, but because humans didn’t have the capability of tracing all of the causal chains from the quantum realm, though the atomic, molecular, and to the organismic level. In this face of this great unknowing, biologists and those interested in living things should continue to employ traditional techniques already developed in the discipline without fear that they will one day be collapsed to the methodologies of chemistry and physics by molecular biologists like Crick. To put my terminology in Elsasser’s mouth, the attitude of biologists should be one of bioexceptionalism. Why? Because when referencing only their basic physical and chemical structure, organisms are “highly indeterminate,” while at the organismic level, living beings are highly constrained. Elsasser thought that gap could only be bridged by understanding “some sort of morphological criteria” not yet known (Elsasser 1998: 52).

From Crick’s ill-defined perspective, this was just as much vitalism as Teilhard de Chardin’s version. It might be hard to see exactly why this should be, since Elsasser offered this challenge from physics, not from Teilhard’s religious motivation. Why did Crick conflate Elsasser’s laws with religious considerations?

To an extent, it was simply an accident of timing. Crick’s promotion of humanism and reduction of religious claims to “nonsense” in the Cambridge Varsity occurred at the same time that he attacked vitalism in the John Danz lectures that became Of Molecules and Men. As Waddington forced him to confess privately, despite his ire, Crick lacked familiarity with the decades of historical and philosophical examination of the claims of vitalism and had not carefully thought through his own claims before publishing.

Yet, it’s worth mentioning that Elsasser’s philosophy-rich rejection of reductionism rendered it strange (if not suspect) to Crick and the growing cadre of molecular biologists just because it felt philosophical, independent of its philosophical content. Apparently, many biologists wanted to avoid even the appearance of being too into philosophy. “Most working biologists…do not like to think and look with a very fishy eye on anything which savors of philosophy,” wrote the editor of the Quarterly Review of Biology, Raymond Pearl, when pressed to publish pieces in theoretical biology (quoted in Peterson 2016: 74). It’s at least conceivable, in other words, that merely the philosophical feel of Elsasser’s work made it seem foreign and something to be avoided. The reductionism promoted by Crick in Of Molecules and Men, that organismic behavior could be reduced to molecules of DNA, seemed more conducive to the typical way of doing science by mid-century. As Waddington himself later explained: “[R]eductionism is a recipe for action…if you are confronted with a complex situation, for instance a living system, your best bet to get some sort of pay-off or other is to look for the physical or chemical factors which can influence the phenomenon in question.” Of course, it made for “lousy philosophy.” But when what is called for is making a “quick (scientific) buck by discovering some useful practical information,” it inhibited the slow, complex search for multiple levels and a plurality of inputs (Waddington 1977: 23–25).

Perhaps by “vitalist,” then, Crick meant that biotonic law “vitalism” stood in the way of his belief in reducing biology to physics and chemistry that facilitated the ultimate goal of bioengineering life (and presumably artificial intelligence) that such a reduction promised. Elsasser’s biotonic laws placed a limit to Crick’s reductionist quest and the progressive bioengineered utopia that was supposed to derive from it. One common objection to religious explanations of national phenomena is that they are “science stoppers”—religious advocates address scientific mysteries with a “because God made the world that way,” and that’s it; there’s nothing more to say. Even if this wasn’t what biotonic laws were intended to do, Crick sensed that they were still anti-progressive, just like religious objections were anti-progressive. “Vitalists” were anyone who thought Crick was wrong about the ease of reduction or who disagreed with the goal of engineering life. It didn’t much matter from what quarter their objections had their origin.

5 Demystifying Mid-Century Vitalism

If we accept Crick’s definition that “vitalists” were anyone who thought he was wrong about the ease of reduction or who disagreed with the goal of engineering life, then indeed there was a fourth wave of vitalism in the middle of the twentieth century. But I do not think we should accept Crick’s definition. For one, it’s not even his own.

Despite the fact that he claimed not to appreciate science fiction,Footnote 6 Crick’s attack on “vitalism” parroted a line of attack by popular science fiction author Isaac Asimov. “Modern science has all but wiped out the borderline between life and non-life,” proclaimed Asimov six years earlier in his very widely read Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. “[I]t is to biochemistry (‘life chemistry’) that biologists today are looking for basic answers to the secrets of reproduction, heredity, evolution, birth, growth, disease, aging, and death.” As a biochemist himself, Crick seems to have taken this sentiment on board. “Once we get down to the nucleic-acid molecules, we are as close to the basis of life as we can get,” Asimov continued. “Here, surely, is the prime substance of life itself. ... All the substances of living matter…depend in the last analysis on DNA” (Asimov 1960: 389). Biochemists and biophysicists, Asimov promised, would in the very near future offer all relevant information about DNA and, it followed from Asimov’s perspective, all of secrets of life.

Just as Waddington challenged Crick’s philosophy of biology in the late-1960s, physiologist Barry Commoner confronted Asimov’s in the early-1960s. It is Commoner’s position against Asimov that we can identify as the beginning of a wave of dissent against reductionism and the bioengineering impulse that flowed from reductionism, which both Asimov and Crick shared.

Commoner had professional standing (as did Waddington). As chair of a Committee on Molecular Biology and chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Commoner ranked neither as a disciplinary outsider nor as a member of the fusty “old guard” defending his legacy. And from that position, Commoner encouraged biologists—even those who agreed with the “increasingly important place in all areas of biological research” now occupied by biochemistry and biophysics—to view statements like Asimov’s not as a corrective against vitalism but as direct attacks on their fields (Commoner 1961: 1746, emphasis in original).

Since biology is the science of life, any successful obliteration of the distinction between living things and other forms of matter ends forever the usefulness of biology as a separate science. If the foregoing [statement of Asimov’s] is even remotely correct, biology is not only under attack; it has been annihilated (Commoner 1961: 1746).

And, in fact it did appear to Commoner and others that the discipline of biology had dramatically lurched toward annihilation in the years since the Second World War. Instead of becoming botanists, embryologists, or even geneticists, new ambitious students migrated to biochemistry and biophysics. Instead of plants or even Drosophila, students learned on model organisms such as bacteria and viruses. The very meaning of “organism” had changed as a result. That trend, feared Commoner (1961: 1747), signaled darker days ahead.

Earlier generations of biologists had also noted how these sorts of philosophical divisions around the theory of life could end up altering the practice of biology as discipline. T. H. Huxley, for instance, long ago noted distinctions between experimental and taxonomic biologists, and the drift in interest and expertise toward the former (Desmond 1997: 628–30). But this time was different, Commoner believed. Organismal biologists felt real apprehension. Headwinds of interest and attitude and, perhaps most importantly, grant money was blowing biology away from the study of systems and organisms and toward a complex but not very exciting molecule—DNA (Schaffner 1969).

The “crisis in biology” was larger than this, however; its root cause, philosophical. Reductionists like Crick presumed “the unique capabilities of living things” had their ultimate explanation in “separable chemical reactions.” The competing anti-reductionist view found those unique capabilities to be “a property of the whole cell” and, beyond that, the whole organism (Commoner 1966: 44). Recent research in physics and chemistry led to the conclusion that cellular organization could not be explained with reference only to chemical and physical constituents. In other words, life was not reducible to non-life; the cell represented the least complex system that counted as living (Commoner 1961: 1747).Footnote 7

That root philosophical cause not only lured practitioners toward studying molecules, Commoner asserted that it also compromised the future welfare of humankind. For too long, physicists and chemists had limited solutions to larger human problems to merely technical fixes. For instance, when applying their scientific knowledge to social problems like food procurement, many scientists exhibited an “increasing tendency to ignore the facts of life” and defaulted to the use of “insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, nematocides, pesticides, and other assorted agents” while ignoring other causes and consequences. By promoting the view of that there was no barrier between living and non-living, these scientists created, with naïvely clear consciences, materials that fatally restricted the “adaptive latitude of the ecological environment, which is so vital to the success of plant, beast, and man” (Commoner 1961: 1748). What’s more, by altering the present adaptive landscape, chemists and physicists also impacted the future in unpredictable ways. Overconfidence in the physico-chemical sciences led to “blindness,” then pollution by an underregulated chemical-industrial complex. If this happened in a large-scale way, like it had in the nuclear-military-industrial complex, Commoner feared not simply for his occupation or his discipline, but for the viability of many kinds of life on Earth, including human. Only “sickness and death” would follow (Commoner 1966: 46). He longed for a more perspicacious alliance between physics, chemistry, and biology in which, organismic biologists would take the reins rather than biochemists like Crick, focused merely on “mating strands of DNA” (Commoner 1961: 1746).

This is the crucial point. For Commoner, the debate over reductionism—so often regarded as an abstraction wrangled over only by professional philosophers of science—took on grave ethical weight.

Other powerful voices joined Commoner’s. Several emphasized the philosophical shortcomings of reductionism. Physical chemist Michael Polanyi’s might have been the loudest; his protégé Marjorie Grene’s the sharpest. They both argued that biology requires a different conceptual scheme.

For whether an organism operates more as a machine or more by a process of equipotential integration, our knowledge of its achievements must rely on a comprehensive appreciation of it which cannot be specified in terms of more impersonal facts, and the logical gap between our comprehension and the specification of our comprehension goes on deepening as we ascend the evolutionary ladder. … [W]hat we observe about the capacities of living beings must be consonant with our reliance on the same kind of capacities for observing it. Biology is life reflecting upon itself… (Polanyi 1962: 347).

Biological processes, according to Polanyi, were those able to maintain stable and open systems. This claim wasn’t new or interesting, of course. Others had compared living thing to flames in slow motion, Polanyi admitted—consuming material, leaving chemically altered by-products, moving, spreading. What differentiates living things from flames, from Polyani’s perspective, is the ability to capture material perturbations large and small and use them to perpetuate themselves in formations more suited to the environment. They develop in new configurations, in other words, and then they pass on those newly developed configurations. These were the new rules of the biological level that emerged from the purely physicochemical. A sentient level rose out of the purely biological, as well. Evolution had to explain these emergent levels, which rendered the theory of evolution into a biotonic law (Polanyi 1962: 344–64).

Marjorie Grene emphasized that the divisions between biology on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other aren’t denials of the continuity of nature—though it isn’t clear that “emergence” does violate that continuity in the first place, as Crick might believe. Causes and explanations just look different in biology than they do in physics or chemistry. In the physical sciences, phenomena follow logically from theory. Given the kinetic theory of gas, for instance, we know that if pressure is thus-and-so and temperature is thus-and-so, then volume is logically predictable. Molecular biologists might say that they’re doing something similar when predicting phenotypic changes after genotypic manipulation—what happens phenotypically when we knockout genes X, Y, and Z. But biological explanations presuppose functioning organisms. And though machines exist for some end beyond themselves—they are made to produce a result—organisms are ends in and of themselves. They possess their own histories. So, causes and explanations in biology specify causal connections that biologists induce from concrete, living, operating individuals. In the physical sciences, identifying causation requires deduction of particulars from abstract logical systems (Grene 1962). Thus biology simply is exceptional: it requires a different logical scheme than physics or chemistry using a system (an organism) that has ends in itself. Geneticists might deny that E. coli or D. melanogaster has ends at all. But, according to Grene, it turns out to be crucially different to be a bacterium than to be a benzene ring and even more crucially different to be a creature that studies both bacteria and benzene.

By the late-1960s, a genuine “wave” of opposition to reductionism overflowed the life sciences and attracted followers in the social sciences as well. Several of these individuals collected at prominent conferences in Europe and the United States well into the 1970s, including the Theoretical Biology symposia at the International Union of Biological Sciences meetings in Italy from 1967 to 1970, the Alpach Symposium in Austria in 1968, the “Biology and the History of the Future” at Chichen Itza, Mexico in 1969, and the “Biology and the Future of Man” conference at Paris in 1974. This is as close to a “fourth wave of vitalism” as the life sciences came.

The question remains: was this “fourth wave” what Crick derided in Of Molecules and Men? The first two waves of vitalism in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries transitioned the theory of life from “frank spookism” to “diluted animism,” but held fundamentally to “non-materialistic points of view” (Beck 1957: 133). Hans Driesch, Henri Bergson, William MacDougall, Charles Otis Whitman, and other “third wave” vitalists early in the twentieth century continued to emphasize an ontological difference between the living from the non-living. Compared to these first three eras of vitalism, the “fourth wave,” from Commoner to Elsasser to Polanyi to Grene to attendees of the 1960s–70s symposia appears dramatically different in several respects. First of all, a larger number and broader range scientists and scholars were involved mid-century. Secondly, the “fourth wave” groups and individuals explicitly disavowed vitalism to a person. Even the most vociferous opponents of reductionism, Arthur Koestler (1969), for instance, did not claim to be vitalists. By these measurements, Crick’s confrontational “…what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow” attacked something that was not there.

6 Not Vitalism; Bioexceptionalism

Still, what Crick surely sensed in the mid-1960s, even if he misidentified what it was and what it wasn’t (i.e., religiously motivated) was an attack on his own simplistic reductionism. And, perhaps to defang that attack, Crick lumped under the heading of ‘vitalist’: (1) those who were skeptical regarding his claims about the eminent ability to reduce the life sciences to the physical sciences and (2) those who were skeptical regarding the desirability of doing so. There were, by my count, at least two dozen prominent life scientists who, following Commoner, openly opposed these two points (Peterson 2016; Peterson & Hall 2020). Counting the numerous physical scientists and philosophers who also opposed these two points, that indeed could constitute a wave. And such a trend seems to have continued. In fact, some philosophers would go so far as to say the twenty-first century has produced a kind of anti-reductionistic consensus, at least among their peers in the humanities (Waters 1990). This is perhaps another cause of the disciplinary canyon dividing the humanities and the life sciences (Callebaut 2010; Grene 1983).

To be clear, this mid-century swell was not the fourth wave of vitalism, as Crick styled it. Organicism is an appropriate term for this twin rejection of vitalism and of reductionism simultaneously. This term has its own history as part of a longer set of anti-reductionistic explanations, though less attention has been paid to it than to the earlier fights over vitalism (Peterson 2016).

Here, though, I want to adopt “bioexceptionalism” as an even more capacious term. This term captures what were loosely defined beliefs held by a very broad, multidisciplinary group including physicists and psychologists as well as philosophers and biologists. They shared doubts about reductionism for ontological reasons (e.g., Niels Bohr, Arthur Koestler, who organized the Alpbach Symposium as “Beyond Reductionism” and espoused the concept of the “holon”) and epistemological ones (e.g., Elsasser, Polanyi, Grene, Waddington, other organicists). Bioexceptionalism also captures the attitudes of those like Commoner, who—while he may have rejected reductionism for the other reasons—feared the ecological and even professional consequences of a reductionist worldview and explicitly rejected reductionism on those grounds. Whether biology could be reduced to physics and chemistry or not, there were good ecological reasons to act as if it could not. The so-called “fourth wave,” then, was a broad collection of those who rejected the reductionistic quest Crick had embarked upon.

I still feel uncomfortable with the metaphor of a “wave,” however. A few dozen individuals pushing back against Crick might appear large. But Crick was a “cross-worlds influencer” both well positioned professionally and highly motivated to discredit those who challenged his reductionism (Aicardi 2016). As Crick’s son, Michael, revealed at his father’s 2004 memorial service:

My thesis here today is that Francis’ driving quest was to knock the final nails in the coffin of vitalism. My father wanted to put these ideas to bed, first of all with the structure of DNA …. Francis was a man who was trying his whole life to win an argument. I never understood who he was arguing against, but he had this total conviction that he had to win this argument (quoted in Aicardi 2016: 87).

In lectures and, especially, personal relationships with younger scholars, Crick leveraged his prestige to marshal supporters across disciplines (e.g., Jacob 1970) to fiercely root out vitalism. Moreover, Crick tied his anti-vitalism to devout anti-religious beliefs. “Francis Crick was an evangelical atheist,” proclaimed two of his memorializers from the neurosciences. “He had a consistent and completely rational world view without a need to invoke vitalism, or any non-material force” (Siegel & Callaway 2004: 2029). As Crick moved from the chemistry of the DNA molecule, to its transcription and translation, to “molecular psychology”—exemplifying his role as a “cross-worlds influencer”—he maintained the conviction expressed in Of Molecules and Men to squeeze religious sentiment out of all science (Aicardi 2016). That zealous leadership allowed Crick to build an “army” of followers even outside his original field of molecular biology (Siegel & Callaway 2004: 2030).

Even leaving aside the question of how much of a wave it was, how could an anti-reductionist alternative rise at all in the middle of Crick’s crusade against it? Bioexceptionalism of the kind advocated by Elsasser, Commoner and others rose because, counterintuitively, the dismissive attitude of reductionists intensified, fueled by Crick and those molecular biologists who sympathized with his condemnation of “vitalism,” his suspicion of philosophy, his anti-religious fervor.

Their rejection of reductionism reaction is understandable. To have one’s subject matter be reduced to something simpler feels insulting somehow—like the reducer is missing the crucial something about one’s knowledge area. One well-known biochemist objected to that dismissive attitude by those committed to physico-chemical reduction this way:

While Occam’s Razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research …. [T]his may make it very difficult for physicists to adapt to most biological research. Physicists are all too apt to look for the wrong sort of generalizations, to concoct theoretical models that are too neat, too powerful, and too clean.

Ironically, this quote belongs to Francis Crick himself (1989: 138–139). Physical scientists, he complained, came into biology with the wrong sort of oversimplifying attitude. Instead of waiting to learn the methods, the way of seeing the world—acquiring personal knowledge, to use Polanyi’s term—they shoved their way through using an inappropriate reductionist methodology. Perhaps as Crick aged, he came to appreciate the insistence of Commoner and others that biology really does require a method distinct from the physical sciences and equally valuable. Reductionism, as even Crick admitted alongside his detractors, is a kind of devaluing. And it takes a kind of hubris to do that devaluing. According to philosopher Mary Midgley (1994: 16), “When we say that any actual thing in the world … is quite simple and needs only one sort of explanation, we are, almost unavoidably, saying that it is something fairly trivial.”

7 Conclusion

If there was a bioexceptionalist wave mid-century, why does Crick’s reductionism seem more persuasive and closer to the heart of modern biology even now? There are at least two reasons: (1) training, and (2) utilitarianism bordering on commodification.

What Elsasser, Polanyi, Grene, and others did not fully appreciate at the time, is that nuanced appeals to the separateness of biology from physics and chemistry made use of philosophical distinctions—between theory and technique, epistemology and metaphysics, is versus as if statements. This is not customarily part of training in biology. According to biologists themselves, biology is not a discipline focused on contemplation so much as on action. For example, when, in the 1970s, the scion of biomedicine Peter Medawar was asked whether the philosophical “attitude with which a man approached biology might help him to focus on certain problems that otherwise might be ignored,” Medawar responded with “a flat negative…it made no difference at all. A man was a good scientist, or he was not” (Goodfield 1974: 87). Thus, as an unintended consequence, advocates for bioexceptionalism asked for philosophical reflection, a skill quite alien to training in the life sciences. Crick’s reductionism was easier, more familiar (de Chadarevian 2002).

Secondly, and perhaps more saliently, Crick expressed hope in bioengineering, by which Crick—though he expressed it very flippantly—seems to have meant three things: (1) the creation of new products generated by modified or completely synthetic organisms that would enhance the human experience; (2) the augmentation of human cognition by computers; (3) the eventual replacement of our present-day biologics, perhaps even humans, by synthetic “organisms.” We certainly do not have to take his futurism seriously. But the history of the life sciences in the second half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first partly comports with the attitude Crick exemplified and that frightened Commoner. Waddington warned that reductionism was good for a “quick (scientific) buck” (Waddington 1977). One wonders whether to what degree today’s followers of Crick still seek the parenthetical.

8 Postscript: Why Did Crick Speak at a High School?

From the Crick to Vice Admiral Frank T. Watkins exchange, 14 December 1965, PPCRI/E/1/14/5. Francis H. C. Crick papers, Wellcome Institute, London, UK.

“I feel I ought to say a word or two about delivering the lectures in the University Presbyterian Church,” wrote Crick to Frank Thomas Watkins, Dean of the Graduate School, University of Washington, and the man who was to make arrangements with Crick to deliver the John Danz lectures. “Although I have not finally decided on the precise title of my lectures,” he continued, “my tentative title is: ‘Is vitalism dead?’ The lectures will be concerned with the impact of biological ideas, both present and future, on our concept of the world.”

It had been a rough few years for Dean Watkins. He came to UW in the early-1960s after a distinguished career as Vice Admiral and head of the Pacific Submarine Fleet for the US Navy. Though he spent a lot of time underwater during World War II, he had no experience as an academic, least of all with graduate students and faculty at what was rapidly becoming the premier research institution in the American Northwest. The university was growing fast and, even with his experience in the military, change was difficult. Worse, on April 29, 1965, a 6.7-magnitude earthquake rattled the whole Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle area, killing several people and damaging thousands of buildings. The University of Washington lost key structures including Meany Hall, the largest lecture space on campus (Buhain 1999; Lange 2000). Crick’s talk, originally scheduled to be delivered in Meany Hall, had to be postponed almost a year. Trustees and administrators wrangled over repairing or replacing the building, creating further delays. The University Presbyterian Church in Seattle stood near campus, seated nearly as many as old Meany, and the church was known for its progressive social vision (Staniunas 2016). It would be a fine substitute. Dean Vice Admiral Watkins made the arrangements.

But the English co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA was being difficult.

Crick, later described as an “evangelical atheist,” promised that his talks on the structure of DNA and vitalism would not be “militantly anti-Christian.” Still, he thought an argument against vitalism might offend “Church Authorities,” given the degree to which he was convinced that vitalism concealed religious beliefs. He had backed out of commitments before merely because they overlapped with events sponsored by churches, let alone actually taking place inside one. Maybe the Seattle Presbyterians wouldn’t like “Is vitalism dead?” Maybe they would regard his talk as “anti-Christian propaganda.” It was a telling admission. Rather than engage with the bioexceptionalist challenges articulated by Elsasser, Commoner, Polanyi, Grene, and others through the 1960s against the loose espousal of reductionism like his, Crick waved his hands at the whole thing. They were merely religious objections (Aicardi 2016). Though, he admitted to Dean Vice Admiral Watkins, “Whether this is widely true I must confess, I do not know.”

I can imagine Dean Vice Admiral Watkins clenching his jaw as he picks up the phone to begin again the hunt for a new venue. Eventually, the UW dean moved the John Danz lectures to the student’s auditorium at Roosevelt High School, where, for 3 days in the winter of 1966, a Nobel laureate preached to his audience that vitalism was out there—alive.