I.

I D. The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host Andrew McDermott. Well today my guest is writer and teacher Daniel Witt to discuss the topic of his recent article at evolution news.org is vitalism making a comeback.

The term vitalism refers to the idea that living things possess a vital force, some fundamental

elements that generally does not exist in non-life.

It's a very old idea that dates back at least to ancient Egypt and ancient Greek thought.

As a Darwinian paradigm took hold of the natural sciences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

Vitalism fell out of favor. But as Daniel reports, a willingness to flirt with vitalism seems to be growing in certain

scientific circles. Daniel welcome to ID the future. Thanks, happy to be here.

Well readers at evolution news.org, our flagship news and commentary site, may be familiar with your name and your articles there.

But this is your first visit to ID the future.

Can you share with listeners just a little bit about you and what got you interested in intelligent design and the debate over evolution?

Yeah, so before I even knew about intelligent design and the debate about evolution, I was always just fascinated by living things, plants, animals, whatever fungi. I was from a little town

in West Texas called Lubbock and there's basically nothing alive there.

Just dust. That's a slight exaggeration. But you know maybe that's the source of the fascination.

Like if you don't have something around you, it becomes more exciting.

Yeah, but it was just kind of ingrained in me. I don't know where it came from. When I was young, I basically refused to learn how to read until I discovered

field guides and then I had to learn how to read because how else am I going to get access

to that information in there?

And I kind of got lucky because when I was about seven,

my father, who is Jonathan Witt, quit his job as an English professor to go work for the Discovery Institute in Seattle.

And so that was a big windfall in a couple ways because Seattle is kind of the opposite of Lubbock.

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