Very eloquent and thought provoking article about the “middle path” between clear-cut mechanistic biology on the one hand, and what basically amount to intelligent-design vitalism on the other. Neither of these two approaches really work anymore: nobody has taken vitalism seriously since the 1800s when the last scraps of alchemy were being burned away by scientific progress; and mechanistic biology is increasingly being found inadequate as the complexity of DNA and proteins (let alone whole cells or even whole organisms) is being realized and scientists are having to come to terms with the fact that protein interactions don’t actually look like the pretty diagrams in cell biology textbooks.

Yet still, the author points out, biological works are steeped in language from both of these dead fields, language which tacitly ascribed rigidity and binary “on or off” attributes to enzymes, while at the same time invoking the “regulatory”, “directional” or “organizing” properties of some molecule.