Following upon my recent post on “Agency as the Emerging Naturalist Paradigm,” here I will discuss some fundamental aspects of purposeful agency, and in particular, whether such agency issues from intelligent design or from a materialistic cause.
As embodied in the Modern Synthesis, the materialist account of evolution has been in steady decline over the past three decades. Expanding knowledge of the vast, intricate complexity of living systems has shown the impossibility of such systems arising simply by “chance and necessity.” Thus, a new materialist framework has been proposed, that of agency theory.
Agency theory differs fundamentally from neo-Darwinism, which treats organisms as passive objects subject to the vicissitudes of external forces just as if they were inanimate objects. Conversely, agency theory asserts that organisms are not passive objects like stones. Instead, they actively participate in the events of evolution. The purposeful nature of organisms is now at last recognized as one of the most fundamental properties of what distinguishes life from nonlife.
Biologists of the 20th century regarded the “apparently purposeful” action of organisms as the result of responses to chemical stimuli, such as hunger, thirst, fear, libido, etc. All of these “goal-directed” activities were deemed readily reducible to simple physiology.
But the complexity of life goes far beyond the macro level of whole organism or organ systems. The stimulus-response or signaling-response behaviors of a hungry cheetah, a rapidly beating heart, or a hypertonic kidney are well described and indeed largely mechanistic. But this gross mechanistic framework belies their underlying complexity.
These macro systems sit atop a hierarchy of micro systems that are not only vastly more complicated, but in fact exert behavior that is largely non-mechanistic. Indeed, one of the foremost naturalist biologists alive today, Stuart Kauffman, has conceded in Beyond Mechanism (2013) that we must accept the fact that biology reveals a world that is not only beyond mechanism, but also beyond neo-Darwinism and the Modern Synthesis:
My aim is to take us to an entirely different, partially unknowable world in which the living, evolving world co-creates its own possibilities of becoming. We are beyond Newton and even beyond Darwin, who did not see that the evolving bio-sphere creates its own future possibilities.
Dethroning the Mechanistic Consensus
The reason that neo-Darwinism and the mechanics it embodies fail to explain organisms is because the operational rules that underlie that theory are context-independent, linear, and recursive, applied to holonomic “objects.” But now, finally, the realization has hit home that organisms are quite the opposite: they are context-dependent, nonlinear, impredicative, and nonholonomic. The Modern Synthesis operated under a completely mechanistic model of organisms which many biologists today believe is simply inadequate. From Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems (2023), edited by Peter A. Corning:
A radically different view of evolution has been emerging in this century. We now know that living systems actively shape their own evolution, in various ways. The distinguished geneticist James Shapiro shows us that the so-called modern synthesis is quite wrong.
This “radically different view” has to invoke an entirely new level of complexity never considered by naturalism, involving concepts that it previously had fundamentally rejected: teleology, purpose, intentionality, and cognition.
Michael Levin, one of the top biology researchers in the world today, is pioneering the field of bioelectricity with its application to cellular intelligence. His revolutionary paradigmproposes that the only way that organisms can do what they do, such that they are truly nonlinear, impredicative, and nonholonomic, requires that biomolecules solve real problems in real time. He writes in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences:
Recent work has begun to emphasize active cybernetic problem-solving capacities in which evolution increases the functional intelligence of cellular collectives. This is fundamentally distinct from the adaptationist/selectionist paradigms, and emphasizes problem-solving, unconventional embodied agency and creativity that is specifically not due to adaptation.
More specifically:
Genomes do not encode large-scale features: they specify cellular hardware that solves problems at multiple scales… [B]iologic systems exploit affordance of the laws of physics and computation to benefit from the learning capacity with network architectures.
Quite remarkably, agency theory embraces the once long discarded concept of teleology, as first described by Aristotle. And where the goal-directedness in nature was once only attributed to sentient beings with central nervous systems, it is now undeniable that such purposeful behavior obtains quite readily down to the level of prokaryotes and even more so down to subcellular components.
We now know at the cellular and subcellular levels that cellular metabolism makes adjustments to whatever perturbations or impedances interfere with the necessities of life. It does so in ways that are far more complex than the simple mechanism of how hunger compels feeding. For example, the one-gene-one-protein hypothesis was a vast oversimplification. It is now clear that there is a whole library of gene combinations and manipulations that the spliceosome and the epigenome and the ribosome can exploit under varying physiological circumstances that are marshalled to improve survivability and function. James Shapiro writes in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science:
Analysis of cellular processes such as metabolism, regulation or protein synthesis, and DNA repair have established that bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus.
The Key Question
How can this goal-directedness arise at the cellular and/or molecular level? One approach to a solution has given rise to the emergent field of cognitive biology as articulated also by Michael Levin among other prominent biological researchers. Pamela Lyons writes in “Fundamental Principles of Cognitive Biology 2.0,” published in the journal Biological Theory:
Cognitive biology revealed for the first time the deep parallels between the activities of biological components and processes and the knowledge-generating capabilities characteristic of cognition.
And again:
What these processes have in common — at multiple scales from molecules to whole organisms — is that they somehow acquire, evaluate and use information about the environment and the current internal state to select actions furthering existential goals. [Emphasis in the original.]
From Michael Levin in Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences:
The framework discussed herein extends the notion of intelligence to suborganism scales, casting morphogenesis as the result of collective intelligence at the molecular, cell tissue, and organ levels … in a naturalistic cybernetic engineering sense of varied degrees of competent problem-solving in diverse spaces …and not merely [as] the emergent outcome of highly parallel local rules.
These rapidly emerging revolutionary developments in cellular biology now constitute an entirely new naturalist framework. The triumph over the mechanistic consensus is a battle won, but the debate now shifts to a whole new venue. Materialism advocates who now concede the irreducibility of life to pure mechanism see this as an opportunity to reframe the argument in terms of agency theory. And they believe they can naturalize these newly recognized “agential” properties of matter to recapture the intellectual high ground in the debate between materialism and design. Michael Levin writes:
By emphasizing the information processing capacities of multiscale components of living systems it becomes possible to recognize the goal-directedness of these underlying processes. It is essential to abandon the traditional scientific teleophobia because cybernetics and control theory now provide a mature naturalistic quantitative science and engineering approach to mechanisms with goals. Goals do not require magic, they require a specific causal structure.
The Debate Has Come Full Circle
ID theorists must recognize that these new discoveries in cellular biology will entirely reshape the debate with scientism. The argument from mechanism is largely resolved. It is crucial that we meet the challenge of these new developments. Remarkably, naturalism has come full circle, conceding the fundamental concept that life is purpose-driven! As such, agency theory is a far better way to appreciate life itself than simple mechanism. That is because there is nothing in the mechanist expression of “fixed genetic programs” that can account for adaptation to as yet unencountered environmental fluctuations or for the evolution of whole new phenotypes. Both of these capabilities exist in biota in a way that agency theory has the potential to better explain.
Naturalists who embrace teleologic agency as the embedded disposition of life and evolution still have a long way to go in identifying what Michael Levin refers to as “specific causal structures.” The working hypothesis is that these are of an entirely different nature from linear mechanism, thus addressing the impredicative, nonholonomic nature of life — which as Stuart Kaufman has said, must be “beyond mechanism.”
The larger point is this. Agency theory as proposed certainly is not “magic,” but it specifically invokes teleology within its operating framework. Naturalists seem unwittingly to be exhuming Thomistic Aristotelianism, which was long ago replaced by the linear mechanism that is now itself being discarded. In denying what some claim as God’s external imposition of design onto life, they have taken the default position of immanent teleology.
Evolution by immanent design? I couldn’t agree more. As T. S. Elliot wrote in Little Gidding (1942): “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”