Historians and biologists identify the debate between mechanists and vitalists over the nature of life itself with the arguments of Driesch, Loeb, and other prominent voices. But what if the conversation was broader and the consequences deeper for the field? Following the suspicions of Joseph Needham in the 1930s and Francis Crick in the 1960s, we deployed tools of the digital humanities to an old problem in the history of biology. We analyzed over 31,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers and learned that bioexceptionalism participated in a robust discursive landscape throughout subfields of the life sciences, occupied even by otherwise unknown biologists.

中文翻译：

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“什么是死的可能不会死”：在普通生物学家中定位边缘化的概念

历史学家和生物学家通过 Driesch、Loeb 和其他著名声音的论点来确定机械论者和活力论者之间关于生命本身本质的争论。但是，如果对话范围更广，对该领域的影响更深呢？继 1930 年代李约瑟和 1960 年代弗朗西斯·克里克的怀疑之后，我们将数字人文工具部署到生物学史上的一个老问题上。我们分析了超过 31,000 篇经过同行评审的科学论文，并了解到生物例外主义在整个生命科学的子领域中参与了一个强大的话语环境，甚至被不为人知的生物学家所占据。