Well, I stopped off at the library on the way home last night and checked out Purpose and Desire. I got through about 150 pages (both reading and skimming) before giving up. No, Turner does not present a good case for re-considering vitalism. He presents a very weak case for treating homeostasis via vitalism, with arguments based largely on metaphor and appeals to intuition. He offers no real definition of what he means by vitalism or concepts like “desire” in this context. His second case, for treating evolution through the lens of vitalism, is based on the existence of a tautology at the heart of modern evolutionary theory. His account of that tautology is muddled – he seems to mean that adaptation is defined as whatever is produced by natural selection, and natural selection is defined as the thing that produces adaptation – but there is in reality no tautology there. He really does seem to be confused about the core of adaptive evolution.