Agency in Evolution
Proposition: Organisms have the agential ability to actively shape their environment and their life trajectory. That ability creates two-way causation between organisms and their environment.
If the above statement is true, organisms have an agential ability to shape their evolution. Might that agency confer directionality to the process – a sense of some goal or target.? ……………….. As Philip Ball said in “How Life Works,” There need be nothing mystical about the question – it is not a backdoor for intelligent design.
But, there is something mystical about the question. What drives “agency” at the cellular level? Is this where biology stops and Deepak Chopra picks up.
Omission of the concept of agency – organisms acting as purposive, adaptive agents – “has left us with a distorted and devitalized concept of inheritance.”*
*Denis Walsh, Philosopher of Biology
