I don’t think “elan vital” needed to be a curiousity stopper. It could be a description.
Some things are alive. Some are not. Live things are different, they do things that dead things do not. It’s a difference that’s worth noticing. If “elan vital” is a synonym for “alive” and not an explanation, then it’s useful. It doesn’t have to stop you from asking what the difference is.
Urea is not alive. That was a red herring. But it suggested a new idea, one that will probably be realised someday soon. In theory there’s nothing about cells that we can’t understand in detail. Probably within 50 years we’ll be able to create a living cell from nonliving components. If not 50 years, certainly within 200 years. We’re very close.
He didn’t actually synthesize a whole living thing. He synthesized a genome and put it into a cell. There’s still a lot of chemical machinery we don’t understand yet.
I don’t think “elan vital” needed to be a curiousity stopper. It could be a description.
Some things are alive. Some are not. Live things are different, they do things that dead things do not. It’s a difference that’s worth noticing. If “elan vital” is a synonym for “alive” and not an explanation, then it’s useful. It doesn’t have to stop you from asking what the difference is.
Urea is not alive. That was a red herring. But it suggested a new idea, one that will probably be realised someday soon. In theory there’s nothing about cells that we can’t understand in detail. Probably within 50 years we’ll be able to create a living cell from nonliving components. If not 50 years, certainly within 200 years. We’re very close.
Not 50 years. Craig Venter did it already in 2010. So it took 3 years to do what you thought it would take 50.
He didn’t actually synthesize a whole living thing. He synthesized a genome and put it into a cell. There’s still a lot of chemical machinery we don’t understand yet.