By Stephen Webster
Vitalism is a profoundly science-ejected inspiration, although many CAM or 'natural well-being' cabals falsely declare that vitalism survives clinical scrutiny.
I quote:
"vitalism is now a useless philosophy [...] for the vitalist, residing issues are possessed (literally) via a 'life force,' totally specific from the physiochemical forces thus far found [...this is] most unlikely to enquire: how do you examine a lifestyles strength? [p.057]."
-r.c.
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The refinement of microscopes over 300 years has profoundly influenced biology, but it would be a gross simplification to imagine that the development of cell biology has simply been a matter of improving optics. A cell the edge of the amoeba biologist works not only with cells and instruments, but also, as I have described above, with ideas. Scientists, being human, speculate. They have imaginations, and see their work as creative. Therefore, however excellent the microscope, there will always be the need, and the desire, to interpret the shadows of a dimly seen image.
A theory was needed to put together all that was known about inheritance, cells and development. Today we do not use the word ideoplasm. We say instead that the inherited material consists of particles called genes, arranged on the chromosomes, but in 1880, though Mendel had done his work and had indeed discussed inherited particles (he called them ‘factors’) his paper was languishing, unappreciated, and nothing was known of genes or DNA. So when a biologist called Roux, working at exactly the same time as Nageli, and thinking about the nature of the ideoplasm, worked out from first principles that the material must be particulate, the insight was crucial.
To get the effect, light is shone up through the cover slip and into the amoeba. Most of the light shines straight through the glass and the amoeba and out the other side; this light is lost and plays no part in the experiment. Some light, however, shines through the glass but is reflected back by the underside of the amoeba. Other light is reflected straight away by the glass cover slip. It is these two wave fronts, one reflected from the amoeba, the other from the cover slip, which can be made to interfere and produce a pattern.