Keyword: agency

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 […]

Published open-access in Biological Theory as part of the upcoming special issue on Ladislav Kováč and the Origins of Cognitive Biology. Abstract: Eating is a fundamental behavior in which all organisms must engage in order to procure the material and energy from their environment that they need to maintain themselves. Since controlling eating requires procuring, […]

Published open-access in Ratio. Abstract: This paper critically revises the organisational account of teleology, which argues that living systems are first and foremost oriented towards a goal: maintaining their own conditions of existence. It points out some limitations of this account, mainly in the capability to account for the richness and complexity of biological systems […]

In this paper, published open access in Human Development, Denis Walsh addresses Piaget’s theory of equilibration and its significance in overcoming the Modern Synthesis, as an object theory, for an agent theory of evolution. Abstract: Piaget’s Behaviour and Evolution (1976) sought to reconcile the view that organismal adaptiveness – in the form of equilibration – could contribute […]

In 1892, Ernst Haeckel introduced the term biopsychism to express the view that all and only living beings are sentient. For Haeckel, this position was to be distinguished both from zoopsychism, the belief that all and only animals are sentient, and his preferred panpsychism, the belief that all and only matter is sentient (Haeckel 1892: […]