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Mechanist The mechanist school
of theory for both biology and psychology was born around the turn of
the century, as greater technology allowed for more precise chemical and
physical measurements, which in turn allowed us to study biological processes
much more closely than before, and to reenact them outside the body. Mechanist theorists
believe that all bodily and phenomena are reducible down to physio-chemical
processes, and that all of them will eventually be studied and understood.
There is no transcendent “vital spirit” that inhabits people
or creatures, there are simply atoms and molecules in complex combinations,
controlled by natural physical laws. Loeb’s article is a defense
of Mechanist ideology, showing its progress and suggesting that like the
phenomena he describes, all life will eventually be explainable in these
biological terms. He gives the success story about how mechanist reduction
was applied to even the miracle of life, and was able to provide a very
coherent, plausible theory that actually matched with observation and
data, though we now know that his description of fertilization was still
inaccurate and incomplete. This theory was posed in opposition to vitalists,
who thought that the mechanistic view could not even be argued plausibly,
because for something to not have the vital spirit, it must be dead, and
therefore the materialists (another term for those who believe in mechanist
reductionism) would be dead, therefore they couldn’t argue their
position (Crane, The Mechanical Mind, p 74, available at Rice Bookstore). It was very bad logic,
and we see with hindsight the foolish blind spot the vitalists had, but
a similar battle is occurring now in psychology/cognitive science, and
the arguments for mechanistic reductionism don’t seem as convincing
when they are saying thought and belief do not exist, that even our most
esoteric reasoning or our capacity for beauty and love are simply the
products of neurotransmitters and neurons. However, the mechanist
model, or Loeb’s version of it, admits that we are only on the cusp
of even having the ability to recognize physical processes (or at least
we were in 1912). We are still discovering the mechanisms of the body,
and certainly biology is not completely explainable in terms we have now.
We must still do a lot more work to even get to the point where we can
see that something biological is going on, and then finding exactly what
that is is the next step. Though it is pretty widely accepted in common
belief that most things should be explainable through science eventually,
and in the case of our bodies, through biology, there still is definitely
question in the realm of the mind. How do you explain a belief with biology?
Reductionism certainly holds religious implications. It does not support the concept of a soul, or that a divine being breathed life into inanimate matter to create us, or life after death. It contradicts the Bible’s assertions that we should be masters over the earth because we are somehow inherently superior to all other life. Reductionism has an incredible humbling effect, since we are made of the same atoms as the rest of the world.
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