Biologist Wolpert on the Antiscience Nature of Vitalism & Holisticism (ISBN 0674929810)

Wolpert, L. (PhD KCL) states in "The Unnatural Nature of Science" (1994; ISBN 0674929810):

"vitalism is an idea which assigns to human life, particularly consciousness, a special quality which must forever remain outside conventional science [...per] an anti-reductionist stance [...] that life cannot be reduced to mere physics and chemistry and that a more holistic approach is required [...] any philosophy that is at its core holistic must tend to be anti-science, because it precludes studying parts of a system separately -- of isolating some parts and examining their behavior without reference to everything else. If every process were dependent on its part in the whole then science could not have succeeded [p.138]."

Note: naturopathy, by the way, claims to be science while vitalistic and holistic.  In other words, that 'science is nonscience.'  In that sense, naturopathy embodies 'the absurd.'