Purpose and agency

Even in smallest of life forms

One of biology’s most enduring dilemmas is how it dances around the issue at the core of such a description:, [of] agency, the ability of living entities to alter their environment (and themselves) with purpose to suit an agenda. Typically, discussions of goals and purposes in biology get respectably neutered with scare quotes: cells and bacteria aren’t really ‘trying’ to do anything, just as organisms don’t evolve ‘in order to’ achieve anything (such as running faster to improve their chances of survival). In the end, it’s all meant to boil down to genes and molecules, chemistry and physics – events unfolding with no aim or design, but that trick our narrative-obsessed minds into perceiving these things.

Yet, on the contrary, we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon.