[Alamo-Girl]

If Darwin had first tackled the definition of what life "is" relative to non-life and death in nature, either his misconception would be later revealed as it was with Newton and space/time - or he would have realized that final cause (function or purpose) is integral to life in nature.

Whereas accidents (e.g. mutations) happen, final cause is the controlling factor in living things, e.g. the mathematical models of Shannon and Rosen.

Leaving Bacon (anti-final cause) behind, the Newtonian paradigm, essentially that the whole is equal to the sum of the parts, would not have been falsely applied in biological investigations.

Life is NOT like non-life/death in nature.

In living systems, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

[tacticalogic]

If Darwin had first tackled the definition of what life "is" relative to non-life and death in nature, either his misconception would be later revealed as it was with Newton and space/time - or he would have realized that final cause (function or purpose) is integral to life in nature.

What exactly was the "misconcepton", and why exactly does the omission of a formal definition of what life is in the theory prevent anyone from discovering it?

You seem to be submitting that if Newton had not published the papers describing mass, time, and space, then Einstein would never have produce the theory of relativity. That seems a rather dubious proposition to me.