Evolution "On Purpose"

Teleonomy in Living Systems

Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, Addy Pross, Gerd B. Müller, Katrin Schäfer, Thomas Pradeu

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9780262376020
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The evolved purposiveness of living systems, termed "teleonomy" by chronobiologist Colin Pittendrigh, has been both a major outcome and causal factor in the history of life on Earth. Many theorists have appreciated this over the years, going back to Lamarck and even Darwin in the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the complex, dynamic process of evolution was simplified into the one-way, bottom-up, single gene-centered paradigm widely known as the modern synthesis. In Evolution "On Purpose," edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross, some twenty theorists attempt to modify this reductive approach by exploring in depth the different ways in which living systems have themselves shaped the course of evolution.

Evolution "On Purpose" puts forward a more inclusive theoretical synthesis that goes far beyond the underlying principles and assumptions of the modern synthesis to accommodate work since the 1950s in molecular genetics, developmental biology, epigenetic inheritance, genomics, multilevel selection, niche construction, physiology, behavior, biosemiotics, chemical reaction theory, and other fields. In the view of the authors, active biological processes are responsible for the direction and the rate of evolution. Essays in this collection grapple with topics from the two-way "read-write" genome to cognition and decision-making in plants to the niche-construction activities of many organisms to the self-making evolution of humankind. As this collection compellingly shows, and as bacterial geneticist James Shapiro emphasizes, "The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Teleonomy in Evolution: “The Ghost in the Machine”
• 3. Cellular Basis of Cognition in Evolution: From Protists and Fungi Up to Animals, Plants, and Root-Fungal Networks
• 4. Constructing “On Purpose”: How Niche Construction Affects Natural Selection
• 5. Relational Agency: A New Ontology for Coevolving Systems
• 6. Teleonomic Anticipatory Configurations in Biological Evolution: The Downward Dynamical Nature of Goal-Directedness
• 7. From Teleonomy to Mentally Driven Goal-Directed Behavior: Evolutionary Considerations
• 8. Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm: A Statistical Mechanics of Emergence
• 9. On the Concept of Meaning in Biology
• 10. Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis as a Teleonomic Process
• 11. Form, Function, Agency: Sources of Natural Purpose in Animal Evolution
• 12. How Purposive Agency Became Banned from Evolutionary Biology
• 13. Goal Attributions in Biology: Objective Fact, Anthropomorphic Bias, or Valuable Heuristic?
• 14. Toward the Physicalization of Biology: Seeking the Chemical Origin of Cognition
• 15. Evolutionary Change Is Naturally Biological and Purposeful
• 16. Agency, Teleonomy, Purpose, and Evolutionary Change in Plant Systems
• 17. Agency, Goal Orientation, and Evolutionary Explanations
• 18. Evolutionary Foundationalism: The Myth of the Chemical Given
• Contributors
• Index