Dear Bhakti Niskama Shanta,
namaste, and thank you for the promotion – I'm not a professor. :-)
Thank you also for the indirect link to the source!
This is a direct link. It says pretty much what I predicted:
"The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable. But all their efforts to find a scientific answer to all the so-called vitalistic phenomena were failures. Generations of vitalists labored in vain to find a scientific explanation for the Lebenskraft ["life force" in German] until it finally became quite clear that such a force simply does not exist."
Mayr's point, evidently, was that the vitalists applied impeccable logic to completely faulty premises and so, through no fault of their own, drew completely wrong conclusions that logically followed from these faulty premises. Yes, Mayr said, organisms aren't wind-up toys as Descartes thought; yes, he said, organisms can't be wind-up toys, as the vitalists correctly pointed out; but, he also said, we're a lot more similar to wind-up toys than the vitalists believed. There is no ghost in the machine; there is no magic that happens between an organism's nucleotide sequence and an organism's behavior or growth or reproduction. The vitalists were not ridiculously stupid, they were simply wrong because they – like everyone else in their time – lacked knowledge of very important facts, said Mayr, and I agree.
Let's get into specifics. Immediately preceding the quote above, Mayr said this:
"The developmental biologists in particular asked some very challenging questions. For exarnple, how can a machine regenerate lost parts, as many kinds of organisms are able to do? How can a machine replicate itself ? How can two machines fuse into a single one like the fusion of two gametes when producing a zygote ?"
In the last thirty years, the science of development genetics has figured out how this works, and the answers don't involve any additional force of nature that the physicists had overlooked.
I really recommend the whole lecture, and would be happy to discuss it all.
My gripe with the size of e-mails is very simple: the e-mails sent on this mailing list are often unusually large – enough so that, several times, they have filled my inbox, and I couldn't receive any further e-mails for hours or days. That is extremely annoying. It is simply rude to send e-mails without any regard for their size, or at least their ratio of information content to size. The two sentences you quoted stand for themselves – what was the point of illustrating them with a photo of the person who said them? What did that contribute, other than making the whole e-mail look like a clumsy argument from authority?
Please consider these matters.
Sincerely,
David Marjanović