21. Frankenstein, Vitalism, and Complexity Science

Abstract

This chapter explores the historical evolution of biological thought, tracing the transition from 19th-century Vitalism to modern Complexity Science. We begin by examining the mechanistic clockwork worldview of the Enlightenment, which sought to reduce life to a series of physical levers and chemical reactions. We then analyze the Vitalist response—exemplified by the animating spark in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—which argued that living organisms possess a unique, holistic integrity that resists mechanistic reduction. While the discovery of DNA and the synthesis of urea eventually debunked the notion of a non-physical vital force, we argue that the Vitalist intuition survives in the contemporary study of emergent properties. By bridging the gap between Romantic holism and non-linear mathematics, this chapter demonstrates how Complexity Science provides a rigorous framework for understanding life as an emergent state of matter, effectively resurrecting the wholeness of Vitalism through the lens of self-organizing systems.

Introduction¶

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the novel published in 1818 by Mary Shelley, encapsulates, among other things, the scientific anxieties of its era. The climax of the story—the animation of the creature via a lightning strike—serves as a powerful metaphor for vitalism, the now-extinct belief that life originates from a vital spark (élan vital).

Although modern science has long since discarded vitalism in favor of purely mechanical and biochemical explanations, the questions posed by vitalists remain relevant. To understand this, one must first examine how vitalism emerged and how it inspired the Romantic protest against a purely mechanical universe, likened to clockwork.

While the biological explanations proposed by vitalism were ultimately discredited, its central intuition—that a living organism is more than the sum of its parts—never fully extinguished. Today, that spirit finds a scientific and rigorous home not in mysticism, but in complexity science. This chapter explores how the ghost of vitalism lives on through the study of emergent properties and self-organizing systems. The primary argument is that while the belief in a vital force has died, the quest to understand the unique, non-linear totality of life remains central to contemporary science.

For those interested in delving deeper into the historical roots of Vitalism and its enduring influence on the evolution of biological thought, we recommend the following selected references: Schultz (1998), Chen (2018), Haigh (1977), López-Valdés et al. (2024).

The Mechanistic Approach¶

The so-called Scientific Revolution catalyzed a profound cultural and intellectual shift. When Isaac Newton demonstrated that the motion of both celestial bodies and terrestrial objects obeyed the same universal laws, he tore down the ancient wall between the heavens and the earth. This unification demonstrated that the dynamics of the universe could be decoded through mathematics and understood as a series of predictable mechanisms. Inspired by this success, Enlightenment philosophers sought to apply the same philosophy to the study of life itself. Physiology ceased to be a branch of metaphysics and became a branch of mechanics.

The 17th and 18th centuries saw a wave of discoveries that reinforced the mechanistic approach:

• Circulatory Hydraulics: In 1628, William Harvey revolutionized medicine by discovering the circulation of blood. In doing so, he redefined the heart as a mechanical pump and the vascular system as a closed circuit of pipes.

• Biological Levers: In his work De Motu Animalium (1680), Giovanni Borelli applied Galilean mathematics to animal movement. He demonstrated that bird flight and human propulsion were not driven by an invisible willpower, but by muscle contractions that followed strict physical laws of levers and pulleys.

• Chemical Solvent: René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur and Lazzaro Spallanzani brought the mechanistic approach to the stomach. Through ingenious experiments—including the use of perforated metal tubes swallowed by animals—they demonstrated that digestion was not a vital cooking of food, but a chemical breakdown via gastric juices that occurred even outside the body.

The philosophical champion of this movement was René Descartes, the architect of the modern mechanical worldview. Descartes introduced mind-body dualism, a framework that provided a philosophical justification for the budding sciences. By bifurcating reality into two distinct substances, he allowed scientists to dissect and mechanize the body without fear of profaning the soul.

Descartes argued that the human body was res extensa (extended matter), an automaton that did not differ in principle from machines. In his view, functions such as breathing, digestion, and even reflexes (a concept he pioneered) were purely mechanical responses to physical stimuli.

Although the body was just a machine to him, Descartes was not a complete materialist; he reserved a special domain for the human soul: the res cogitans (thinking thing). Unlike previous traditions that attributed biological growth or movement to the soul, Descartes strictly limited its role to consciousness and will. The soul became the pilot of the ship: the driver who gives orders and experiences sensations, but remains entirely removed from the mechanical labor of the organs. Descartes’ ideas set the stage for the next great conflict: if the body is simply a machine, what is the spark that truly distinguishes the living from the dead?

From Animism to Vitalism¶

Although the mechanistic approach proved immensely successful, it was never universally accepted. Critics argued that treating the body as a mere collection of gears and pumps failed to explain the most fundamental characteristic of life: its persistent resistance to disorder.

One of the earliest and most influential critics was Georg Stahl, a Prussian physician famous for his phlogiston theory in chemistry. Stahl’s objection to the mechanistic approach was based on a simple observation: the phenomenon of decomposition.

Stahl argued that if the body were truly a machine, it should remain stable even after it stops functioning, much like a clock remains a clock even when its gears have stopped. However, a living organism decomposes rapidly the moment it dies. Being the son of a Lutheran pastor, Stahl proposed a theological solution known as animism. He maintained that the soul (anima) was not simply a pilot in charge of will and consciousness; it was the active biological agent responsible for the constant regulation, balance, and preservation of the body. Without the active intervention of the soul, the body’s chemical components would succumb to the natural laws of putrefaction.

Stahl’s ideas germinated at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montpellier. Here, the debate shifted from the religious toward the physiological. Montpellier physicians were intrigued by the phenomenon then known as irritability: the innate capacity of living tissue to react to external stimuli.

They observed a phenomenon that directly contradicted Stahl’s animism: certain organs and muscles continued to contract and react even after an organism had died. If the soul had departed, what was driving that movement?

The most influential figure of this school, Paul-Joseph Barthez, offered a secular alternative. He concluded that, since irritability persisted without a soul, a vital principle must exist. Unlike Stahl’s soul, this principle was not necessarily supernatural; it was a force unique to living matter that operated outside the known laws of Newtonian physics and chemistry.

The emergence of vitalism created a fundamental schism in the life sciences. On one side were the mechanists, following a reductionist approach: breaking life down into its smallest inanimate parts to understand the whole. On the other side were the vitalists, who favored a holistic approach.

It is crucial to recognize that the vitalists’ objections were scientifically valid, even if their conclusions were ultimately refuted. They were the first to identify that life involves goal-oriented behavior and self-regulation—concepts that the mechanistic models of the time could not explain. Although the vital principle was eventually rejected by modern biology, the vitalists were the first to grapple with the totality of life.

The Death of Vitalism¶

The influence of Paul-Joseph Barthez was profound. As a contributor to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, his vital principle permeated European scientific consciousness, finding its most famous experimental exponent in Luigi Galvani. In the 1780s, Galvani discovered that he could make frog legs twitch by stimulating them with electricity. Later, he discovered he could induce the same movement using only a bimetallic arc. Galvani concluded that he had discovered animal electricity, a physical manifestation of the vital principle. This discovery marked the birth of electrophysiology and the direct inspiration for the electric lightning that animates Frankenstein’s creature.

Galvani’s ideas were soon challenged by Alessandro Volta, who demonstrated that the electricity in Galvani’s experiments did not come from the frog, but from the contact of different metals with the ionic solution of the tissues. In doing so, Volta invented the electric battery and proved that the vital spark was actually a universal physical force.

Vitalism soon faced a series of catastrophic blows:

• Chemical Unity: In 1828, Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea from inorganic substances, demonstrating that organic and inorganic chemistry were part of the same science.

• Homeostasis: Claude Bernard and later Walter Cannon argued that the self-regulation of living beings was due to mechanisms that maintained a constant milieu intérieur (internal environment).

• Cybernetics: Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow deepened the ideas of Bernard and Cannon, showing that the purpose found in both living organisms and some machines could be explained by regulation through negative feedback loops. They addressed the same questions as the Montpellier vitalists but found a purely mechanistic answer.

• Fermentation: Louis Pasteur showed that the microorganisms responsible for fermentation are not spontaneously generated, which seemed to give new life to vitalism. However, Eduard Buchner proved that fermentation could occur in the absence of life using isolated enzymes.

• Active Transport: At the beginning of the 20th century, Edward Waymouth Reid found that cells have the ability to move ions against concentration and electric field gradients, and invoked the vital principle to explain his observations. However, metabolic energy studies by Dennis Robert Hoagland and the mathematical models of Hodgkin and Huxley allowed this phenomenon to be explained through physics and chemistry.

• Molecular Biology: The coup de grâce came with the discovery of the 3D structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, which explained inheritance mechanically. When François Jacob and Jacques Monod discovered that gene expression was controlled by feedback loops, the vital force became obsolete. In his book Chance and Necessity, Monod officially declared the death of vitalism.

Romanticism and Ecology¶

Vitalism has died in the sense that no contemporary scientist resorts to non-physical or mystical principles to explain biological phenomena. However, the holistic intuition of the vitalists—the belief that life must be understood as an integrated whole and not as a mere list of ingredients—is very much alive. To trace this lineage, we must look toward the Romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment.

While the Enlightenment sought to dissect the world into predictable components, Romanticism emerged as a passionate defense of the organic and the interconnected. The Romantics viewed the mechanistic universe as a cold abstraction that “murders to dissect”.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the quintessential Romantic critique. Inspired by Galvani’s “animal electricity,” Shelley did not just write a horror story; she wrote a warning about the limits of reductionism. Victor Frankenstein is a master of parts—assembling a perfect body from disparate pieces—and yet, he is horrified by the result. The vital spark results in a creature that is more than the sum of the collected organs and tissues, possessing a consciousness and a totality that Victor’s mechanistic training failed to anticipate.

The spirit of Romanticism did not only inspire art; it gave birth to a new kind of science. Its most towering figure was Alexander von Humboldt. Unlike Enlightenment scientists who studied species in isolation, Humboldt saw nature as a Naturgemälde: a web of life.

Humboldt’s approach was the foundation of ecology, a science that is Romantic in its very essence. Ecology is defined by three characteristics that distance it from the mechanistic approach:

1. Interconnectivity: The belief that no organism or population exists in isolation from the rest.

2. The Whole over the Parts: The understanding that an ecosystem is a singular and integrated system of relationships.

3. Non-linearity: The notion that a small perturbation in one part of the network can cause a massive cascade of effects throughout the system.

From Ecology to Complexity Science¶

Modern complexity science is a rigorous and interdisciplinary field, born from the intersection of cybernetics, non-linear dynamics, and statistical physics. However, despite all its technical precision, it inherits its philosophy from the holistic tradition of ecology.

Complexity science examines systems—from cellular networks to vast ecosystems—where myriad interacting components spontaneously organize into sophisticated structures. It stands in direct contrast to the classical mechanistic approach, which relies on reductionism: the belief that a system is simply the sum of its isolated parts. Instead, complexity science prioritizes the relationships and feedback loops between those parts. It operates under the principle that, at specific thresholds of organizational density, emergent properties appear: phenomena such as life, consciousness, or collective social behavior that are entirely absent in the individual components. This provides a formal and mathematical framework for the totality that vitalists once attributed to the vital principle.

Where mechanists only saw linear cause and effect, complexity science identifies a deeper architecture. Just as vitalists insisted that life was a unique state of being, modern science now sees life as an emergent state of matter, governed by the laws of self-organization.

In conclusion, although the vital principle of the 19th century has been discredited, its intellectual spirit endures. Complexity science represents the modern fulfillment of the vitalist dream: a method to decode the miracle of life through the laws of physics, without ever sacrificing the integrity of the whole.

Discussion¶

The history of the life sciences has long been defined by the tension between the clock and the spark. As we have seen, the mechanistic reductionism of the Enlightenment successfully dismantled the mystical vital spirits of antiquity, replacing them with the predictable laws of hydraulics, chemistry, and eventually, genetics. The death of Vitalism was not merely a change in preference but a consequence of the scientific ability to synthesize the organic from the inorganic, proving that the components of life are bound by the same universal laws as inanimate matter.

However, the Modern Prometheus of Mary Shelley serves as a persistent reminder that a list of parts—no matter how perfectly assembled—does not automatically constitute a living whole. The Vitalists’ failure was not in their observation that life is special, but in their assumption that this “specialness” required a supernatural ingredient.

Today, Complexity Science offers the final resolution to this centuries-old schism. It accepts the mechanistic truth that life is composed of ordinary atoms, yet it honors the Vitalist truth that the organization of those atoms creates something transcending its individual parts. Through the study of emergence and feedback loops, we now understand that the “vital spark” is not a substance, but a process.

As we move toward a future of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, the lessons of Frankenstein remain more relevant than ever. We are learning that being is a threshold property of complexity. Whether it arises in a web of biological neurons or a dense network of silicon circuits, the phenomenon of life continues to be defined by its non-linear wholeness—proving that while the ghost in the machine has been exorcised, the miracle of the machine’s self-organization remains the central frontier of science.