Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Vitalism" in Romanian language version.
A general history of the sciences initiated by Georges Cuvier, for example, lauded the Montpellier vitalists for their role in demolishing "crude mechanist explanations" of body function and thus opening the way to a refurbished mechanism, built on late-Enlightenment advances in the physical sciences, that eventually vanquished vitalism and cleared the high road to the modern life sciences.17
Vitalism has become so disreputable a belief in the last fifty years that no biologist alive today would want to be classified as a vitalist. Still, the remnants of vitalist thinking can be found in the work of Alistair Hardy, Sewall Wright, and Charles Birch, who seem to believe in some sort of nonmaterial principle in organisms.