Keyword: agency

From October 10–12, at the University of Toronto, a workshop marked 40 years since the publication of The Dialectical Biologist (1985) by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. The book, a collection of their earlier papers, aimed to present a coherent vision of how Marxian dialectics can inform biological theory. It stands alongside other critical works, […]

How could the first living systems learn to regulate themselves before the emergence of genes? In their new paper, Ben Shirt-Ediss, Arián Ferrero-Fernández, Daniele De Martino, Leonardo Bich, Álvaro Moreno, and Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo tackle this question through Araudia, a novel simulation platform for studying protocell evolution. They show that simple protocell ecologies, composed of metabolically […]

In this new book, Alvaro Moreno and Juli Peretó look at the major transitions in the history of biological agency, from the origins of life to the complexity of Metazoans, and its role in the complexification of biological organization in the history of life. Available open-access here. About this book This open access book exposes […]

Description from the event page: Hybrid Event – To obtain the Zoom information, click on the “Register” button above or use the link at the bottom of the page Forty years have passed since Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin published The Dialectical Biologist in 1985. At the time the publication was generally met with puzzlement […]

At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical relatives are parts of entirely distinct evolutionary conversations: ‘adapting’ immediately evokes thoughts of natural selection, ‘adaptive’ (typically paired with ‘maladaptive’) is used in normative evaluations of […]

This new special issue of Synthese challenges the widespread neglect of teleology in analytic philosophy, demonstrating its ongoing relevance across multiple domains. While often dismissed due to its historical associations with Aristotelianism and pre-Darwinian thought, teleological explanations remain indispensable in understanding biological functions, human agency, social institutions, and even aspects of epistemology and ethics. The […]

By James DiFrisco & Richard Gawne. Published in Journal of Evolutionary Biology Abstract: This paper evaluates recent work purporting to show that the “agency” of organisms is an important phenomenon for evolutionary biology to study. Biological agency is understood as the capacity for goal-directed, self-determining activity—a capacity that is present in all organisms irrespective of […]

Published open access in Frontiers in Phychology Abstract: The way organismic agents come to know the world, and the way algorithms solve problems, are fundamentally different. The most sensible course of action for an organism does not simply follow from logical rules of inference. Before it can even use such rules, the organism must tackle […]

Tahar, Mathilde (2024). Du finalisme en biologie. Bergson et la théorie de l’évolution. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. As Ernst Mayr wrote, “no other ideology has influenced biology more profoundly than teleological thinking” (Mayr 1992, 117). This approach, which interprets phenomena based on their finality (telos), has permeated the history of biology since Aristotle. It […]

with Marc Bekoff and Matthew Hayek About the even Current approaches in environmental conservation do not sufficiently recognize the agency of wild animals, meaningfully affecting the outcomes of conservation interventions. In this conversation, the authors of two recent articles on this topic will discuss how understanding individual differences in animal personalities and behaviors can transform […]