Wal, Occam's razor is a beautiful thing, but paradigms shift when the count of anomalies grows too large or cannot be readily blocked out.

The good Doctor Harvey, he who first documented the pumping motion of the heart and the circulatory system's general anatomy, was up against a deeply embedded model of circulation that traced its origins all the way back to Galen, who had been the primary authority on medical models since the 2d century A.D. Galen's model of tides and humours looks antiquated and superstitious today... but for 1400 years, it had explained medical problems and served as a robust model. Harvey's research flew in the face of this entrenched paradigm, and the furor that arose from it was quite a tumult. If Harvey had not been an aristocrat and established at court he might well have been ridden out of town on a rail, like Ignaz Semmelweiss, who also suggested an effective improved model that went against the teaching of Galen's version of humours.


Your argument on behalf of testability is admirable. I would be curious to hear what kind of a test case you think would serve to elucidate the postulate of a non-material component to life organisms.



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