Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It Hardcover – 30 December 2017

Scott Turner contends. “To be scientists, we force ourselves into a Hobson’s choice on the matter: accept intentionality and purposefulness as real attributes of life, which disqualifies you as a scientist; or become a scientist and dismiss life’s distinctive quality from your thinking. I have come to believe that this choice actually stands in the way of our having a fully coherent theory of life...? Growing research shows that exhibiting purpose and desire to maintain homeostasis to sustain life is the most distinctive quality shared by all living things. In Purpose and Desire, Turner draws on the work of Claude Bernard, a contemporary of Darwin revered within evolutionary circles, to build on Bernard’s “dangerous idea” of vitalism, which seeks to identify what makes “life” a unique phenomenon of nature. To further its quest to achieve a fuller understanding of life, Turner argues, science must move beyond strictly accepted measures that consider only the mechanics of nature. A thoughtful appeal to widen our perspective of biology that is grounded in scientific evidence, Purpose and Desire helps us bridge the ideological evolutionary divide.

Categories: Fiction