Edmund Sinnott
(1888-1968)
Edmund Ware Sinnott was a botanist who specialized in plant morphology. He earned his bachelor's, master's, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard in the last years of
William James' time at Harvard.
His 1955 book
Biology of the Spirit compared the "directive" or "purposive" biological development processes in the bodies of all living things to the workings of the mind in higher animals/, proposing to solve the difficult
mind-body problem in philosophy.
Sinnott built on the work of
Hans Driesch, whose "
entelechy" (a term adopted from
Aristotle) was meant to be distinguished from a "final cause" or "telos" pre-existing an organism.
Driesch's work was variously criticized as a form of
vitalism,
organicism, or
orthogenesis.
Vitalism is the idea of a non-physical force driving evolution (See
Henri Bergson's
élan vital).
Organicism is the idea that everything in nature, including the material world of physical particles, is assumed to be living.
Orthogenesis, orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution or autogenesis, is the hypothesis that life has an innate tendency to move in a direction.
But both Driesch and Sinnott are simply identifying the
immaterial information structures in living things and in minds that provide the
form through which matter and energy flow, maintaining life by
communicating between cooperating body parts, the organs, neural networks, the cells and their organelles, with their microscopic biochemical processes (e.g., neurotransmitters, hormone signaling, the immune system) and biophysical machines (e.g, ATP Synthase, DNA repair, mitosis, meiosis).
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