Biologists behaving badly: vitalism and the language of language

A comparison is made between Biologos, the "language of language" that predominates in current infocentric biology, and Logos, the classic bringer of form to chaos. The immaterial information on which Biologos is based is seen to bear intriguing similarities to just the sort of disembodied formative powers that an aggressively materialist biology has long derided. I address these issues by meeting a (perhaps only hypothetical) charge that my own work is in some sense vitalist, first with the usual flat denial, then with a countercharge. My third move is a nontraditional one, meant not as capitulation or acquiescence, but as an acknowledgement that the terms of this debate, never clear, continue to be remarkably ill-defined. The question of how best to think about development, or epigenesis--the process whereby organisms come into being--remains a legitimately contested and difficult one.