Agency & evolution

This article is one of a series  investigating biological agency and its relationship to human agency. These articles are introduced in the article on biological explanation.  Much of the discussion revolves around the scientific appreciation and accommodation of real (genetically inherited) but mindless (non-cognitive, ?teleonomic) goal-directedness (agency) that is a universal feature of life. Biological agency is treated as having cognitive and non-cognitive (pre-cognitive) components. The non-cognitive agential traits, as evolutionary precursors to cognitive traits, are referred to here using the general term pre-cognition. While it is currently conventional to treat biological agency as a human creation - the reading of human intention into nature - this website explores the claim that it was non-cognitive biological agency that ‘created’ human bodies and human subjectivity.

The suite of articles on this topic include: What is life? - the crucial role of agency in determining purposes, values, and what it is to be alive; Purpose - the history of the notion of purpose (teleology) including eight modes (claimed sources of purpose) in biology ; Biological agency - an investigtion of the nature of biological agency; Human-talk - the application of human terms, especially cognitive terms, to non-human organisms; Being like-minded - the way our understanding of the minded agency of human intention is grounded in evolutionary characteristics inherited from biological agency; Biological values - the grounding of biological values, including human morality, in organismal behavioral propensities (biological normativity); Evolution of biological agency - the actual evolutionary emergence of human agency out of biological agency; Plant sense and Plant intelligence addressing the rapidly developing research field of pre-cognitive agency in plants.

Describing real but non-cognitive agential biological traits (goal-directed behavior) using the language of human cognition results in cognitive metaphor. This has created profound philosophical and semantic confusion (see human-talk).  Formal scientific recognition of pre-cognitive biological agency is, therefore, a combined philosophical, linguistic, and scientific challenge. Though word meanings cannot be changed at will, in science it is possible to refine categories and concepts to better represent the world.^[73] It is being increasingly acknowledged that human agency is a limited, specialized, and highly evolved form of more general biological agency. However, without a formally developed and descriptive technical terminology, the agential properties of organisms are frequently described using language conventionally restricted to human agency – essentially the language of human cognition and intentional psychology. Thus, the increasing scientific application of words like ‘agency’, ‘purpose’, ‘cognition’, ‘intelligence’, ‘reason’, ‘memory’, and ‘learning’ across biology is broadening their conventional semantic range to include all organisms, and the treatment of such usage as cognitive metaphor is declining.

For a summary of the findings and claims made in these articles see the evolving article called biological desiderata.

Introduction – Agency and Evolution

The article on biological agency pointed out that the goal-directed behavior of organisms is an objective fact – a characteristic that is open to empirical investigation and demonstration. While the behavior of organisms is directed toward a seemingly infinite number of short- and long-term proximate goals, this variety can be distilled down to just a few ultimate goals as the universal biological predisposition to survive, reproduce, and flourish (referred to on this web site as the biological axiom). So, while each autonomous organism pursues all kinds of proximate goals, it is these three goals that are central to biology because they are not only objective, they are also universal and ultimate: universal because they are expressed by all living organisms; objective because they are a mind-independent empirical fact; and ultimate because they are a summation and unification of all proximate goals (including those of humans).

The biological axiom is a principle of both life and its individuation: it states the necessary preconditions for both life itself, and the organisms that are its units of expression. As functional units of organization, organisms themselves consist of individually functional structures, processes, and behaviors but these are integrated and unified by the ultimate goals of the biological axiom.  Since the biological axiom summarizes the goals that motivate all organisms, it is also a statement of agency, purpose, and normativity.  It is simultaneously a principle of life, and its mode of individuation, while also being a declaration of agency, purpose, fact, and value.

Talk of biological agency, purpose, and value is philosophically and scientifically problematic because these characteristics have become uniquely associated with human minds and human activity.

These shared agential goals of both humans and non-humans create a scientific and conceptual dilemma. How, if at all, is the mostly mindless agency of non-human organisms related to the minded agency of humans? How is biological agency related to human agency?

This web site argues that pre-evolutionary biology made no physical or theoretical connection between humans and the ‘rest’. All were created uniquely by God as discrete and immutable: the ‘rest’, it was assumed, were probably created by God for the benefit of humans.

Since the mid 19^th century and the formalization of Darwin’s theory of evolution it has become clear that human agency, for all its unique and powerful characteristics is, nevertheless, a specialized form of biological agency. The similarities shared by biological and human agency are not just conceptual similarities, they are grounded in evolutionary history. Further, biological agency and human agency are not mutually exclusive; scientifically, human agency, purpose, and values are most efficiently explained and understood as highly evolved forms of biological agency, purpose, and values.

While we can grasp the way that physical structures evolve in time, it is difficult to comprehend how abstract concepts like ‘agency’, ‘purpose’, and ‘value’ can also evolve with context.

This article looks at how – while the objective, universal, and ultimate goals of living organisms have remained the same from the time of the appearance of the first organism, their mode of expression is as varied as the range of structures, processes, and behavior that are to be found in the community of life.

How did human agency evolve out of biological agency?

Aristotle

Aristotle defined life using the concept of the ‘soul’ as a vital principle or animating force that distinguished living organisms from inanimate objects. He treated the soul in an aggregative way. The vegetative soul, which was common to all living things, expressed life functions of nutrition, growth, and reproduction. The sensitive soul expressed, in addition to the properties of the vegetative soul, the properties of perception and sensation, while the rational soul, in addition to the properties of the vegetative and sensitive souls, expressed the properties reason, intellect, and thought including the ability to make moral choices, and have self-awareness. This way of representing biology captures the later Darwinian idea of evolution by modification from a common ancestor.

Aristotle’s philosophy was deeply rooted in his concept of hylomorphism, the idea that everything in the natural world is a combination of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). Morphe was that which makes something unique; the conditions that establish individuation. In the case of living organisms, the soul is the form that organizes and animates the matter of the body. Today we would regard matter (hyle) as minimally influenced by human factors while morphe must be acknowledged as human interpretation.

Aristotle emphasized the close connection between body and soul. He understood the soul as the form of the body, and the two as interdependent. This view contrasts with the dualism of thinkers like Plato, who believed in a strict separation between the soul and the body.

Aristotle’s concept of the soul provided an account of life, consciousness, and human nature. We should only modify his insights when we feel empirically secure.

The Darwinian revolution

Biological structures – like hearts, wings, and eyes – are physical objects open to empirical investigation. But well into the 20th century studies of the brain and mind were considered crude and unscientific speculation about inaccessible internal, and therefore private and unknowable, mental states. The mind was a mysterious spiritual realm whose secrets could only be accessed by religion or philosophy, not science.

There has been a remarkable turnaround as today the brain, mind, consciousness, and artificial intelligence are at the forefront of scientific research – regarded by many as the last major scientific frontier. But the conceptual connections between the language of human intentional psychology and the non-human biological world remain, as yet, underexplored.

We like our ideas to be clear and distinct. Communication is simplified when things are straightforwardly true or false, real or unreal, fact or fiction.

But sometimes physical properties in the real world are not just present or absent, and statements about them are true or false. Rather, they exist in nature by degree. We see a rainbow and find it convenient to speak of its discrete colors when, in nature, color is a continuum of wavelengths. While mathematics and physics tend to be about precision and certainty, biology tends to be about generality, gradation, and exceptions.

From an evolutionary perspective, the community of life is what might be called an interrupted organic continuum. Although it is the consequence of a physical continuum in time, we humans find it convenient to discriminate the differences we associate with individual species. We recognize ourselves in apes, much less in whales, and very little in plants. Even so, our common biological heritage means that we actually share many genes with our plant cousins.

Culturally, it seems, we are still coming to terms with the idea of biological continuity.  Nowadays we accept that humans are animals. Before Darwin, such a suggestion would have raised eyebrows, partly because it was presumed by most that humans were a special part of God’s Creation. Humans had souls that needed redemption, animals were not even a part of such a scheme.

Scientifically, we have moved from the desire to establish human exceptionalism (difference) to an acceptance of the more realistic position of our connection to all life (similarity). The idea of plant and animal agency as being continuous with human agency is no longer a heresy.

Prior to Darwin humanity managed daily life, medicine, and biological science, without the notion of nature’s organic continuity and connection. In the Christian world, the similarities and differences of biological species were the discrete creations of God. The scientific account of heritable continuity, of genetic information passed between the generations as shared genes, and over a vast expanse of geological time, all followed after Darwin.

Darwin showed that all organisms and living structures have evolutionary antecedents, and this was a new idea. It meant that a full explanation and understanding of any biological feature must incorporate an evolutionary history of relationships – everything in nature was now connected to everything else both physically and temporally.

The combination of Darwinism (1859) and the later replacement of the Steady State theory of the universe with the Big Bang theory (1930s) meant that for the first time, in the early- to mid-20th century, the notion of universal and organic emergence gained a new impetus and significance as science adjusted to the idea of the universe, not as an eternal creation, but as a gradual unfolding of novel elements, materials, structures, properties, and relations. Darwin showed how the particularly complex form of matter that we know as ‘life’, a late arrival in the universe, was a product of descent with modification from a common ancestor. Then physics replaced the former eternal Steady State theory of the universe with a theory of material and stellar evolution originating from the point source of the Big Bang.

A subsequent 20th century chronometric revolution has allowed us to place major universal and biological events within a firm temporal framework. Today, for example, an evolutionary understanding of the organ we call the heart takes us back 600-700 million years to its barely recognizable evolutionary origins as a single-layered tube in tunicates.

These events of the late 19th and early 20th century showed that organs, like human brains, are evolutionarily connected to similar structures in other creatures. Brains and minds are not present or absent in nature, but present by degree, as determined by their evolutionary history.

Before Darwin each species was a unique and immutable creation of God. Darwin made the unpopular claim that humans had emerged in a decidedly undignified way from ape-like ancestors.

The prevailing Aristotelian and Christian understanding of the world and its life forms in Darwin’s day was as a hierarchy of the world’s contents arranged from higher to lower like the rungs of a ladder, surmounted by humans and eclipsed only by God. Darwin represented life as a tree on which humans were not the single ultimate goal of evolution as implied by the ladder metaphor.  Instead, he proposed that the selective interaction between organisms and their environments had produced many physical solutions with humans just one of these, poised at the tip of just one branch of the vast tree of life.

We have accepted the idea of humanity being part of the evolutionary continuum of animals, but our human self-interest and anthropocentrism has rejected the idea of our mental attributes having evolutionary antecedents in biological agency. Biological agency is either denied altogether or measured in human terms as being only agent-like because the only real goals in nature are the goals of human intention.

Evolution

Aristotle noted that we can, in an abstract way, locate any object in the world by considering its είδος (species) as those features that make it distinct, while at the same time considering the characteristics that it shares with other objects of a particular kind or γένοςs (genus). This was a simultaneous consideration of similarity and difference that formed the underlying principle of scientific binomial nomenclature promoted by Linnaeus in the 18^th century (and our system of naming ourselves using two words).  

Aristotle and Linnaeus lived before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of species . . . Linnaeus, indeed, believed in Special Creation – that each species was uniquely created by God and was immutable. However, Linnaeus’s hierarchical classification, which nested groups of living organisms within other groups, in a boxes-within-boxes system of Aristotelian similarities and differences, perfectly resembled the Darwinian principle of descent by modification from a common ancestor.

The theory of evolution explains how all living organisms are physically connected to one-another, no matter how distant that physical connection might be. Descent by modification from a common ancestor explains how, in spite of the vast range of biodiversity we see in the community of life, all organisms still have some features in common, with closely related organisms sharing more features than those that are distantly related.

To establish and analyze evolutionary relationships – to place any object within an evolutionary context – we must know not only those features that uniquely define the object under investigation, but also those characteristics that it shares with its relatives.

Assuming that biological agency is real then a description of the evolutionary relationship between biological agency and human agency must explain not only those agential features that uniquely define human intention, but also those agential features that are shared with mindless ancestral organisms.

Unique & shared characters

Establishing the evolutionary context of any organism, structure, process, behaviour, or concept, requires two sets of characters: those that it shares with its evolutionary relatives (the grounding characteristics that establish evolutionary connection), and those that are unique (the characteristics that uniquely identify and define the item under investigation), sometimes called derived or emergent characteristics.^[1]

Just as different physical structures (e.g. the fins of whales and wings of bats) may appear extremely different while sharing the grounding characteristics of their evolutionary history (both have the ground-plan of a pentadactyl limb), so unique mental concepts (minded intentions) share mind-like grounding characteristics with their evolutionary mental antecedents (the mindless but mind-like ‘goals’ of biological agency).

The mind-like grounding characteristics express the real evolutionary continuity and physical connection that exists between the mind-like and the minded. Concepts that are uniquely minded frequently reflect (are a subset or specialized development of) the universal and grounding agential characteristics of biological agency. That is, the minded has a mindless (but mind-like) grounding component. In general terms, human agency is a minded evolutionary development of biological agency, and many of the concepts we associate with human conscious intention have a mindless semantic component.

This point is labored here because the logical difference implied by the distinction between ‘minded’ and ‘mindless’ seems so logically transparent and impregnable that, over the years, it has swept aside all possibility of miscegenation that might exist in biology itself – in the world. It has ignored or denied the existence of biological agency as an evolutionary grade between the mindlessness of inanimate matter and the mindedness of human intention.

Starting with an understanding of biological agency as behaviour motivated by the goals of the biological axiom, and human agency as behaviour motivated by the goals of conscious intention, scientific clarification begins by recognizing that the minded goals of human agency are not separate from, but particular instances of (extensions or developments of) the more general and mostly mindless goals of biological agency. That the unique and emergent goals of minded conscious intention are grounded in the mindless goals of biological agency.

The conflation of meaning that makes up our intuitive understanding of the concepts ‘agency’ and ‘mind’ is best explained in evolutionary terms, whereby uniquely derived characteristics (such as minds and mental concepts) share ancestral characteristics.

Bodies expressing biological agency evolved into bodies expressing biological agency in a minded form.

Principle – concepts of biological and human agencies are not mutually exclusive in the way that organisms with minds are different from those without minds. Concepts of human agency are grounded in (share similarities with) concepts of biological agency

Agency, purposes, values, & goals

Complex organisms arose by the evolutionary differentiation of simple ones. The first organism brought with it the potential to produce the entire community of life, both past and present.  Could organism-related concepts, like ‘agency’, share a parallel evolutionary history of differentiation and complexification?

Clearly there are, in one sense, as many different forms of biological agency as there are biological kinds and individuals. Forms of biological agency will therefore vary according to the nature of their agents . . . and in biology this means gradation.

In their most abstract, simple, and undifferentiated or primordial forms the meaning of concepts of ‘agency’, ‘value’, ‘goal’, and ‘reason’ (and others) (like the evolution of their physical counterparts) merge into one-another. They have, as it were, a common ancestral form, which is their most generalized meaning. This abstraction becomes more differentiated, concrete, and distinct when understood in terms of the physical mode of expression. So, for example, all the above words may be understood in a broad sense as the tendency for one thing to occur rather than another and, in this sense, the evolution of agency also begins with the evolution of all these other concepts.

Wherever there is order, there is a hint of all these concepts . . . a ‘directionality’ that exists within the potential randomicity and chaos. We glimpse this directionality in the regularities (constants, principles, or laws) of the universe that make prediction possible, and which give the universe itself a crude behavioral orientation – just the glimmer of a point of view or perspective – a teleology of the faintest kind.

Historically, this wispy directionality of the universe changed dramatically when small parts of its matter formed into units that expressed their own autonomous directionality. These units replicated themselves incorporating information from their external environment in a feedback loop of changes (algorithm of life) that reinforced their capacity to survive, reproduce and flourish (biological axiom). This was the origin of individual agency resisting the natural tendencies of its surroundings using negentropy. These agents we now call organisms, their expression of autonomy is biological agency, and the universal behavioral mode of expression of biological agency is summarized in the biological axiom.

The biological axiom states the necessary agential preconditions for all life as a behavioral orientation, stance, perspective, or attitude of organisms towards their surroundings. These universal objective goals that motivate the behavior of all organisms – that give all life a similar ‘perspective’ on the world – are also appropriately referred to as purposes, values, and reasons.

Organism & environment

The orderly organization of matter necessitated by the physical constants of the universe underwent a miraculous transformation with the emergence of unified units of matter that could reproduce themselves while simultaneously incorporating feedback from their surroundings (algorithm of life). These autonomous units engaged in a cycle of replication that we now refer to as evolution by descent with modification – a mechanical process of physical fine-tuning using environmental feedback.

From the matter of the universe had arisen autonomous organisms that were capable of flexible and independent behavior in relation to their surroundings. They were units of matter that expressed agency as goal-directed behavior. This was life expressed crudely as the change resulting from the interaction between an autonomous agent (organism) and its surroundings (environment).

The organism, though expressing agential autonomy, was nevertheless dependent on its surroundings. There was a tension between processes generated from within the organism as actions, and processes generated from within the organism in response to its environment as reactions. For convenience the internally generated factors are referred to here as organismal and those factors outside the organism stimulating reaction are referred to as environmental. It is the interplay between these two factors that generates both short-and long-term activity (behaviour).

The agential conditions for life – being universal, ultimate, and objective – have remained the same throughout history. But evolution has mindlessly ‘explored’ variations on this basic theme. It has created physical forms as diverse as the amoeba, crabs, fish, trees, and humans. With motility came the development of a coordinating central nervous systems. The benefits of collectives of autonomous individuals gathered evolutionary significance leading to systems of increasing cooperation rather than aggressive autonomy, most obviously the development of human material and symbolic culture.

From our mindless evolutionary ancestry emerged a predisposition for individual autonomy and the selfish attainment of individual needs. Human reason has shown how emphasis on primacy of the individual can be undesirable and inefficient: that communal efforts (codes of behaviour of various kinds) can overcome self-centeredness, and the negative impacts of biological appetites and intuitions, to achieve a universally beneficial cultural evolution.

Agency & selection pressure

Biological agency is an expression of autonomy demonstrated by behavior that is an interaction between the organism as agent, and its environment. This behavior is, in a simple sense, initiated either internally or externally – by either the organism’s internal requirements that then act on the environment, or as the organism’s response to factors in the environment. In both cases the behavior is the outcome of inner agential processing.

Depending on the agent, there will be degrees of behavioral flexibility and control of outcomes. While the overall evolutionary trend (selection pressure) might be considered as tending towards increasing agential flexibility and control, possible evolutionary outcomes are constrained by structural limitations (humans cannot fly, fish cannot live on land). But while structures limit possible evolutionary outcomes, it is agency that drives the evolutionary process since structures are more or less effective in relation to the organisms’s ultimate goals (biological axiom) as they play out in particular environments.

French zoologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), pioneer of comparative anatomy, claimed that function is more basic than form; that form emerges as a consequence of function. Certainly, insofar as structures support the organism in the attainment of ultimate goals, structures are subordinate to functions.

Agential control was greatly increased with the advent of mobility which, since it vastly increased the range of possible sensory inputs from the environment, also accelerated the development of the central nervous system which increased in complexity reaching its current zenith in the human brain. The tendency for evolution to increase agential flexibility is exemplified by the human brain that allows humans to overcome these structural biological constraints (technology extends the senses, aircraft allow humans to fly, submarines permit life underwater etc.).

In the beginning

It is hardly controversial to claim that life emerged from physicochemical stuff when functionally integrated autonomous replicating units of matter developed the capacity to adapt to their conditions of existence (both internal and external). These were not mere replicating units of matter, they were matter that could evolve. Their propensity to survive and reproduce endowed them with a behavioral orientation and goal-directed agency.

The agency of organisms is obvious in the way that they act on and react to their conditions of existence in a flexible and adaptive way. Having some autonomy meant that these biological agents could influence their own future: they had a limited capacity for self-determination. They were therefore not completely hapless victims of circumstance. This agential capacity to influence their own destiny was not a conscious or ‘minded’ phenomenon: it was a mechanical and mindless goal-directed process of ‘self-adjustment’ or ‘self-correction’ relative to its conditions. It was this mindless behavioral orientation that would, through an evolutionary process lasting billions of years, give rise to human bodies, human brains, and the miracle of human subjectivity as matter that has become aware of itself. The behavioral orientation of this matter expresses what today’s human subjectivity understands as a perspective, direction, point of view, or value.

Without the inherited goal-directed behavior of organisms, evolution would not have occurred. This is the powerful engine of biological agency that makes natural selection possible. Perhaps unknowingly, Darwin was tacitly leaning on his great biological predecessor Aristotle.

From biological agency to human agency

When we assume that agency is mind-dependent we study its evolution by confining our attention to the evolution of human cognitive faculties. So, we examine the brains of ancestral primates, the evolutionary changes in brain structures that are revealed by the fossil record, the integration of neuronal networks, and so on, as they relate to contemporary human brains.

But if agency is more widely dispersed across the biological world, then we can explore the in-principle evolutionary changes that must have occurred as biological agency emerged from inanimate matter, sentience emerged from insentient matter, self-conscious minds emerged from sentient ones, and how, subsequently, powerful collective agency was liberated when individual human agencies were connected by the cultural development of sociality and the invention of symbolic languages.

This evolutionary development of agency from inanimate matter to culturally integrated minds can be usefully divided into five phases as biological matter increased in complexity. This is not a description of linear evolutionary development, but of the agential organization of organic matter considered in relation to mind – and it is essentially the same as that devised by Aristotle over 2000 years ago.

What we call ‘agency’, Aristotle called ‘soul’ –  as the totality of activities of an organism – the functional organization that gives every organism its unity of purpose.

One feature of Aristotle’s classification was that it treated novelty not as unique and all-embracing, but as building on an already existing foundation.

A modern formulation of Aristotle’s depiction of the soul (agency) might look something like the list below:

1. Inanimate & mindless – e.g. rock

2. Mindless but agential – e.g. plant

3. Minded, agential, & sentient – conscious, can feel pleasure and pain, but without symbolic languages & reason – e.g. domestic animals.

4. Minded, agential, sentient, reasoning – can reason and use symbolic communication: the mental influence on behaviour is both conscious and unconscious – e.g. individual humans

5. Cultural – collectively agreed implementation of social norms facilitated by the use of symbolic systems – e.g. moral and behavioural codes, ideologies, religions, science, laws etc.

Today we think of evolution in terms of the multitude of organic forms that make up the many branches of the vast tree that is the community of life. We know much more than Aristotle about the internal and external factors that are at play when we consider the organism-environment continuum and the evolution of one biological kind from another. But Aristotle was not giving us an account of physical evolution, he was describing the nature of agency across the living world – and in this he displayed his usual remarkable insight.

A brief look at each of these modes of agency gives us some insight into their evolutionary connections.

Inanimate mindlessness

The lifeless world of physical matter is not absolutely agentially inert. The universe is not a place of randomicity and chaos. Physics investigates the order of lifeless matter and it finds that order in physical constants – the laws of the universe. Knowing the behaviour of matter enables us to move from cause to effect, and even predict the future of the universe.

What this means is that we see in inorganic matter the whisper of agency as orientation or ‘direction’. Prediction is primordial purpose, implying both the existence of, and our understanding of, ‘ends’.

This feeble directionality and its hint of agency takes a quantum leap when we consider the goal-directed unity of purpose expressed by each and every living organism.

Mindless agency

As humans we naturally hold dear our own position within the scheme of things, especially our conscious capacity for self-reflection, reason, abstract thought, language, and sociality. But, in biological terms, this is just a form of anthropocentrism since mindedness, though powerful, is but one (albeit special and powerful) manifestation of biological agency.

The goal-directed behaviour of all living organisms is an objective fact.^[41]  It is this behaviour that is the source of the objective (mind-independent), universal and ultimate goals (see biological axiom below) referred to here as biological agency. These emergent properties of living organisms arose in nature in a naturalistic and causally transparent way; they are the properties that distinguish the living from the inanimate and dead. Since these mind-independent goals and agency preceded people in evolutionary time, they must therefore have existed in a mindless form prior to the arrival of humans on planet Earth. And, as these three goals are general and universal rather than specific, they more closely resemble what, in human-talk, we would refer to as ‘values’ rather than goals (goal = achievable target, value = aspiration), and are therefore referred to on this web site as biological values.

The many proximate goals we see manifested in the behaviour of organisms are unified (can be summarized) in the unified, universal, objective, and ultimate predisposition of all organisms to survive, reproduce, and flourish – referred to here as the biological axiom – sometimes expressed in more abstract terms as ‘fitness maximization’.

The biological values (generalized goals) of the biological axiom are universal because they are expressed by all living organisms. They are ultimate because they represent the summation of all proximate goals. They are objective because they are a mind-independent empirical fact.

It is typically organisms^[43] that express the autonomous agential unity of purpose needed to express biological agency and values.

As open and dynamic agential systems, organisms regulate and integrate their flows of energy, materials, and information. In the short-term (one generation) this behaviour occurs over a lifecycle of fertilization, growth and development, maturation, reproduction, senescence, and death. Over the long term (multiple generations) all organisms, as products of natural selection, display species-specific adaptive design and the potential to evolve new forms when heritable variation, transmitted to phenotypes via the chemical DNA, is subject to environmental selection.

We are more closely connected to nature than many of us care to admit. In the wonder we feel for the miracle of our conscious awareness and the rational faculty that has helped our species dominate planet Earth, we can underestimate the mindless ‘purposiveness, creative imagination, and rationality‘ that exists, by degree, in mindless nature. We feel that our minds transcend the meaninglessness, and purposelessness that is mindlessness. But it was this mindless nature that gave us (that created) our brains, consciousness, and reason. This is agency that cannot be ignored.

The facility with which we move from human intention to biological agency in our thinking patterns and language should signal to us the possibility of their close connection in reality. This is hardly surprising when we realize that the unique properties of minded human intentionality evolved out of the universally shared biological properties of mindless biological agency.

Humans, perched at the tip of one branch of the evolutionary tree of life, have minded agential properties that emerged from the more general and shared mindless properties of the biological agency that pervades the entire community of life.

Minded agency

In recent times we see our coming-to-terms with nature existing in a graduated form by our acceptance of both the idea that humans are animals, and that the momentous evolutionary step, the emergence of awareness, of consciousness, is a property that is not unique to humans, it exists in nature by degree.

Since human minded agency evolved out of mindless biological agency it shares many of its characteristics. That is, biological (mostly mindless) agency and human (minded) agency are not mutually exclusive but complementary.

Mindless agency in minded organisms
There is much mindless and unconscious biological agency at work in minded bodies.

The additive aspect of evolution is manifested in the way that minded organisms, just like their mindless ancestors, display the mindless but purposeful processes of physiology and metabolism. Thus, paradoxically, minded organisms display mindless agency. Almost every structure, process and behaviour of our bodies is structured to achieve mindless goals of various kinds.

Unconscious agency in minded organisms
But our minds are themselves are subject to kinds of agency about which we are unaware. The presence of minds does not mean that agency is always a consequence of rational deliberation. Much of our behaviour is motivated by unconscious needs and desires – the intuitive or instinctive responses over which we have little or no control. There are the non-rational responses that are part of our moral psychology, many of which are the reasons for the suppressive aspect of collective codes of behaviour. The perception of humans uniquely guided by reason accounts for just one aspect of human agency.

It is only since the advent of Darwin‘s theory of descent with modification from a common ancestor that it has been possible to provide such an account of agential intergrading. Special Creation, human souls, the emphasis on reason, and the exclusive attribution of agency to humans – all these cultural influences have placed humanity above and beyond nature.

Cultural agency

It is easy to emphasize individual behaviour and forget the powerful agency that can be henerated by collective action. We have only to consider the influence on our behaviour of parents, education, and community, as well as religion, political and other ideologies, to realize the extent to which cultural norms determine our behaviour.

The accumulation of knowledge and cultural tradition is made possible by communication using symbolic languages that permit the storage of information – in spoken, written, printed, and electronic forms. These are powerful collective cognitive tools that are unavailable to the cognitively challenged.

Grounding of human agential concepts

We are more closely connected to nature than many of us care to admit. In the wonder we feel for the miracle of our conscious awareness and the rational faculty that has helped our species dominate planet Earth, we can underestimate the mindless ‘purposiveness, creative imagination, and rationality’ that exists, by degree, in mindless nature. It was this mindless nature that gave us (that created) our brains, consciousness, and reason – the tools that allow us to make such judgements.

The facility with which we move from human intention to biological agency in our thinking patterns and language should signal to us the possibility of their close connection in reality. This is hardly surprising when we realize that the unique properties of minded human intentionality evolved out of the universally shared biological properties of mindless biological agency.

Aristotle’s description of humans as rational animals and religion‘s singling out of humanity as qualitatively different from the rest of Creation has echoed down the millennia and mitigated strongly against a thorough examination of the agential properties that humans share with other organisms.

Our emphasis on the unique and special character of human reason and agency is, in biological terms, an overemphasis. We have ignored the fact that organisms, unlike rocks, are ‘competent without comprehension‘ (Dan Dennett), that they can be ‘for without foresight‘ (Roger Spencer), and that they express ‘knowledge without knowing‘ (David Deutsch).^[30] The self-evidence of these alliterative insights remind us of the agency that exists in the space between our own conscious and minded intentions and the agential desert that is inanimate matter.

More importantly, such likenesses seem to apply across much of our intentional discourse.  We don’t have to look far to see ‘memory without remembering‘, ‘normativity without morality‘, and so on. Using the medium of human-talk we can assert that in all organisms the genome brings a physical ‘memory’ to the present. Natural selection then adds ‘reason’ as a process of ‘self-correction’ or ‘adaptation’ which is the ability to ‘learn’ from past mistakes in a mindless form of ‘anticipation’ . . . the capacity for ‘foresight’. We use the medium of human-talk (anthropomorphism) to express these real  (evolutionarily grounded) similarities between pre-minded characteristics and their minded counterparts – but our anthropocentrism tempts us to restrict agency to human mental activity (and the language of human intentional psychology) even though we intuitively recognize and acknowledge (by using human-talk) the real connection between all these mindless properties and their minded equivalents . . . that nature manifests real mindless purpose and agency.

Humans, perched at the tip of one branch of the evolutionary tree of life, have agential properties that emerge from those exhibited by the entire community of life. The likenesses being compared in these sentences, the connections between human and organismic agential relata, remind us that from the perspective of agency, organisms with minds and organisms without minds have much in common and, more importantly, this likeness is not an arbitrary and metaphorical ‘as if’ likeness but a likeness grounded in the physical reality of evolutionary history.

Without a technical vocabulary to describe the agential evolutionary antecedents of human cognitive faculties biological agency has been absorbed by (conflated with) the language of human intentional psychology, then treated as cognitive metaphor.

Human agency

Human agency is a specialized (minded) form of biological agency.

At present it is conventional to treat the language of ‘wants’, ‘strategies’, ‘preferences’ etc. as uniquely minded human faculties, the products of conscious brains.But the human-talk (anthropomorphism) currently interpreted as inappropriate cognitive metaphor can now be understood as a way of communicating the characteristics of universal biological agency by misleadingly using the minded language of human intentional psychology in relation to non-human organisms.

The existence of life presupposes at least survival and reproduction as core properties of biological agency that emerged from the universe as the necessary preconditions for agential life. These properties remain constant in all organisms (biological axiom) while the form of their expression varies with the multiplicity of organismic structures, processes, and behaviours we encounter in the community of life.

Our brains were created by nature in a graduated evolutionary process and, just as we now know that consciousness exists in a graduated form (there is a strong sense in which monkeys, cows, fish, even worms, or anything with a central nervous system, is conscious), so it is possible to see in nature the antecedents of minded agential behaviour – to acknowledge that mindedness, for all its uniqueness, is an evolutionary elaboration of antecedent biological conditions – the goal-directed activity of mindless organisms.

In their crudest form the shared properties of biological agency (those of the biological axiom) emerged from the universe as the preconditions necessary for agential life.

Our emphasis on human conscious deliberation, we are coming to realize is, in biological terms, an overemphasis that does a disservice to our evolutionary connection with the entire community of life. We have ignored the fact that organisms are ‘competent without comprehension‘ (Dan Dennett), ‘for without foresight‘ (Roger Spencer), and that they express ‘knowledge without knowing‘ (David Deutsch).^[30] But insights like these apply across the board of intentional discourse.  There is also ‘memory without remembering‘, ‘normativity without morality‘, and so on.

The likenesses being compared in these examples, the connections between human and biological relata, are drawing our attention away from the distinction between the minded and mindless (with emphasis on the uniquely defining characteristics of human agency) and towards the universal and shared biological likenesses that are founded on historical evolutionary connection.

Human conscious experience is just one evolutionary outcome of the many evolutionary paths explored by the structural diversification and complexification of non-conscious, mindless, goal-directed (agential) behaviour.

Agency in individual humans

Brains evolved in a graduated evolutionary way and, just as we now know that consciousness exists in a graduated form, so it is possible to see in nature the graduated antecedents of the minded agential behaviour. So, what are the characters that uniquely define human agency, and what are the characters that are shared with other organisms?

When we look at the evolution of physical structures and agency we see that their gradation can take on an additive or modular character. Just as the underlying structure of the pentadactyl limb is manifest in diverse ways so new and uniquely derived features of brains and agency do not totally transform what was previously present. Instead, though they can take very different forms, they can builds on what was there before in an additive process of progressive inclusion.

Shared properties of biological agency

A simple (but now contentious) model of the human brain divides it into three parts:

Reptilian or primal brain – (brainstem, the medulla, and the cerebellum) is associated with instincts – survival, including territoriality and the self-preservation of feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction.

Mammalian brain – (limbic system including hippocampus, amygdala, anterior thalamic nuclei, limbic cortex) emotions and feelings – including social and nurturing behavior, reciprocity

Primate brain (the neocortex) – logical and abstract thinking, thoughts, memory, cognition, language, sense perception, spatial reasoning.

This heuristic presents us with a brain that did not evolve by reconfiguring its structure in its entirety. Rather, new structures evolved on top of pre-existing evolutionarily antecedent ones.

Aristotle understood agency in nature this way (see diagram) and it provides us with a way of understanding that biological and human agencies are not mutually exclusive; that the presence of ancient elements of biological agency exist within human agency.

The following agency heuristic applies to agency as it evolved in biology across the community of life and as it is represented in human agency. In humans it is a whole-of-body agency not just the agency manifest by our cognitive faculties.

Mindless – automatic and mechanical, but regulated and goal-directed, physiological responses – in humans sweating and vomiting

Minded unconscious – instinctive or intuitive responses of minded conscious and sentient organisms – in humans, behaviours like phobias etc.

Minded & conscious – individual deliberation (use of individual reason), self-awareness, abstract thought

Cultural – advanced sociality (influence of parents, peers, schooling, culture etc.), use of symbolic communication

Human mindlessness

Humans have minds so how can they behave in a mindless way?

When we think of human agency as building on the biological agency that is expressed in every aspect of a living organism then it is easy to see how the infinite number of physiological and biochemical regulatory processes that assist in the maintenance of an organisms’s unity of purpose (biological axiom) contribute in a mindless way to that organisms’s existence – whether or not it has a mind. 

Unique properties of human agency

We assess agency in others – whether animals or plants, minded or mindless – by observing their behaviour. But as animals capable of introspection, we humans can look at our own agency and try to describe it as best we can. How can we describe our sense of being an agent?

Can we categorize or divide up in some way the mental aspects of our agency? If we constructed a lexicon of intentional words, would they fall naturally under a few headings? Can we sense, intuitively, the mental forces that drive our behaviour?

If such characteristics are to be found then it seems reasonable to view them as grounding our agency and in this way connecting our agency to that of other organisms.

Though any such taxonomy is contentious, from ancient times it has been evident that we can discern two major mental attributes influencing our decision-making and behaviour. We know this because they are frequently in conflict. Firstly, there are the reactions of impulse, emotion, and intuition which, for simplicity, might fall under the heading of ‘value’. But, as Aristotle noted, this potential influence on our behaviour is frequently subjected the beam of reason.

If we follow the sociologists view of human agency as the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world, then it seems hardly contentious to claim that these choices and are guided by the twin influences of value and reason.

Both value and reason assume the presence of knowledge. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has recently defined rationality as ‘The ability to use knowledge to attain goals’.

The individuation of value and reason is supported by vocabularies that appear to fall under each heading, and the way that these two mental properties can be in conflict. Knowledge has less intuitive appeal but, if we define reason as the ability to use knowledge to attain goals, then value is the other side of the same coin. Human goals clearly depend as much on values as they do on reason.

The assumption, then, is that these three characteristics of intentionality – value, reason, and knowledge – have some foundation in reality. If human agency evolved (emerged) out of biological agency then we might expect to find shared characteristics that are part of the grounding biological substrate?

Human cognition with its strongly developed hindsight, foresight, abstract and recursive thought, and mental representation, opened up possibilities by providing choices and potentially increasing behavioral flexibility beyond that of any other organism. This is most obvious in the development of the technology that overcomes our physical limitations (spectacles, hearing aids, aircraft and spaceships, submarines etc.).

The infinite variety of physical structures, processes, and behaviors we see in the community of life are, in effect, evolutionary variations on the theme of the biological axiom. Evolution is, however, all about trade-offs with the advantages of a graduated increase in physical complexity and specialization offset by the limitations of their path-dependent consequences.

The apparent cognitive freedom enjoyed by humans is both associated with and constrained by its origins. Cognitive locutions of human agency like ‘choosing’, ‘trying’, ‘hunting’, ‘fleeing’, ‘deterring’, even ‘believing’ and ‘desiring’, when applied to non-human organisms, have their evolutionarily grounded correlates in biological agency.

Minded agential concepts

If we regard human agency as a development of biological agency (sharing many of its properties) rather than being an independent minded phenomenon, then how are we to understand minded concepts like knowledge and value? Can concepts like these be understood by degree in the same way that we think of agency as existing by degree?

In practice, we will of course tend to think of these words in minded contexts, but scientifically we can avoid anthropocentrism by examining them from the perspective of biological agency, not human agency. That is, we can extend their semantic range to include their mindless, unconscious, conscious, and cultural forms.

Value, reason, & knowledge

There was a time in the evolution of organisms when eyes, brains, and legs first evolved and a factual development of their structure, properties, and relations in time.

The properties of agency include knowledge, evaluation, and reason, locked into an organism that is driven to survive, reproduce and flourish. Once these agential properties were present then evolution would begin its exploration of their physical manifestation.

The evolutionary ‘direction’ was promoted by reasons in nature that had ‘beneficiaries’ (with circumstances that promoted the conditions of the biological axiom). The capacity of life to constrain its internal and external circumstances, to direct outcomes, constitutes pre-conscious evaluation. Then, pre-conscious reason in nature can be recognized as the inherent capacity for ‘self-correction’. This is most obvious in the logic of the process of adaptation under natural selection. These precursor purposes, values and reason that emerged at the dawn of life, existed unconsciously in nature long before humanity evolved, even though only humans (as highly evolved purpose-, value-, and reason-representers) are now aware of them.

It is important to distinguish between the faculty of reason and reasons themselves while also recognizing that reasons can exist independently of human minds. There are reasons why the moon circles the Earth (physical reasons), there are reasons why spiders build webs (mindless biological reasons related to biological agency) while the reasons of human agency derive from both conscious deliberation and unconscious response. That is, there is a substantial difference between the reasons why I go shopping, and the reasons why I jump away from snakes although both demonstrate the behaviour of an agent. Unconscious human agency links to not only the instinctive behaviour of sentient creatures but also the mindless behaviour of plants since both share underlying biological agency.

A distinction must be made between biological agency in general and human agency in particular. Human agency evolved out of biological agency and shares its ultimate goals; it is a minded form of biological agency with many shared characteristics.

Two major kinds of agency, and their variants, have can now be usefully distinguished: first, the biological agency that unites all life. This includes both mindless and minded organisms that are grounded in the biological axiom; second, minded human agency that is of two kinds, unconscious (intuitive or instinctive) under the strong control of the biological axiom, and the conscious thought and related behaviour, still grounded in the biological axiom, but as modified by reason.

Reason

Individual conscious deliberation
The capacity for human individuals to use reason has, as Aristotle pointed out (humans are rational animals), differentiated and, in a sense, raised Homo sapiens above other species. The power of reason is surely our greatest human asset since it makes us aware of the contrary forces of mindless and unconscious biological agency, and cultural tradition.

We can view human agency from the perspective of biology and its broad evolutionary context, but we can also ask what it is that uniquely defines human agency.

Principle  – the unique and emergent goals of minded conscious intention are grounded in the mindless goals of biological agency

Principle  – biological agency is expressed in both the quantitatively graded differences that occur between species, and the qualitative changes that have occurred in the course of biological and cultural evolutionary history

Principle  – human agency derives from a combination of four major sources: mindless biological agency (physiological function), unconscious behaviour (individual unconscious or instinctive response) behaviour;  individual conscious deliberation; collective cultural public agreements made possible by the use of symbolic languages

It is also true that writing poetry, playing chess, doing mathematics, composing music, and painting landscapes all appear to have little to do with the biological axiom. But we would no more do these things if they did not give us some kind of biological satisfaction or reward. We would not engage in sex if it gave us no pleasure.

Commentary

Biological agency – as units of matter with the unified, universal, ultimate, and objective behavioural goals of survival, reproduction, and flourishing – first emerged on Earth about 3.7 billion years ago. These were the first living organisms whose agential behaviour was readily distinguished from that of the inanimate matter around them.

This can be confusing. Indeed, both biology and philosophy have confused and conflated the distinction between biological agency and human agency generating millennia of scientific, philosophical, and linguistic ambiguity.

Four kinds of biological agency can be usefully distinguished in relation to the familiar minded and intentional agency of humans. First, the mindless automatic and mechanical, but regulated physiological processes of stimulus and response.

Second, the minded but unconscious – instinctive or intuitive responses of minded conscious and sentient organisms – in humans, behaviours like phobias etc.

Minded & conscious – individual deliberation (use of individual reason), self-awareness, abstract thought

Collective deliberation – advanced sociality (influence of parents, peers, schooling, culture etc.), use of symbolic communication

Glossary

Adaptation (biological) – the word 'adaptation' expresses, in the most parsimonious way, the means by which organisms, as biological agents, attain their goals. 'Adaptation' can refer to both a process or trait. The process by which populations of organisms change over many generations in response to environmental factors, developing heritable traits that enhance their survival and reproductive success in specific environments; the evolution of traits with functions that enhance fitness (being conducive to survival, reproduction, and flourishing); the capacity for self-correction - in the short-term through behavioral flexibility, leading to long-term genetic change
Agency - (general) the capacity to act on and react to conditions of existence with goal-directed behavior; (biological) the mostly mindless autonomous capacity of biological individuals to act on, and react to, their conditions of existence (both internal and external) in a unified, goal-directed but flexible way (see biological axiom). Agency is the physical manifestation of functionally integrated behavior. Human agency is biological agency supplemented by the evolved resources of the human mind including: language, self-reflective and conscious reason, hindsight, foresight, and abstract thought
Agent - something that acts or brings things about. Mindless inorganic agents include objects like missiles, cities, and computers. In biology - an organism as autonomous matter with the capacity to behave in a unified goal-directed way as stated by the biological axiom (sometimes extended to include genes, groups, or other entities, even natural selection itself) as a (semi)autonomous individual with inputs as flows of energy, materials, and information, internal processing, and outputs as energy, waste, action and reaction in relation to inner and outer environments. An organism motivated by real goals (these may be mindless, that is, without conscious intention);  an agent can act and react; it is the instrument or means by which a purpose is pursued
Agential realism - the claim that non-human organisms exhibit agency in a mindless way, and that humans combine both mindless and minded agency: the grounding of cognitive biological metaphors in non-cognitive biological facts
Algorithm of life - life is autonomous and agential matter that self-replicates with variation that, by a process of evolutionary selection, incorporates feedback from the environment thus facilitating its persistence.

1. Endow units of matter with agency as the capacity to adapt to their conditions of existence (to survive, reproduce, and flourish).
2. Combine the behavioral orientation of 1 with genetic modifications arising in each new generation
3. Expose 2 to evolutionary selection pressures resulting in differential survival
4. Surviving forms return to step 2

Anthropocentric - to view and interpret circumstances in terms of human experience and values
Anthropomorphism - the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities
Apomorphy - a specialized trait or character that is unique to a group or species: a character state (such as the presence of feathers) that is not present in an ancestral form
Autopoiesis - self-replication combined with self-maintenance and modification is sometimes referred to as autopoiesis
Behavior (biology) - actions performed by a biological agent (or, more loosely, its parts); the internally coordinated but externally observable response of whole organisms to internal and external stimuli. Behaviour may be: mindless or minded; conscious, unconscious, or subconscious; overt or covert; innate or learned; voluntary or involuntary. Learning capacity is graded in complexity
Behavioral ecology – the study of the evolution of animal behavior in response to environmental pressures
Biological agency - the capacity of autonomous living organisms as biological agents to act on, and respond to, their conditions of existence in a flexible way and with a unity of adaptive purpose - the goal-directed behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish; the capacity of living organisms to act with intentionality; a life-defining property of living organisms; the motivation for biological activity as described by the biological axiom; the capacity of organisms to act with purpose and intentionality; the biological principle that has generated the entire community of life; the capacity organisms act intentionally in the sense that their behavior is purposeful and adaptive i.e. directed towards objects, properties, or states of affairs
Biological agent - while biological agency, in a broad sense. can be ascribed to almost any biological structure, process, or behavior, it is the organism that best serves as its exemplar, standard, or prototype cf. organism, biological agency. an organism as an autonomous unit of matter with a flexible and adaptive propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish (the universal, objective, and ultimate unity of purpose shared by all life); biological agents, organisms are self-replicating units that regulate the internal and external exchange of energy, materials, and information that is required for their autonomous pursuit of goals
Biological axiom – a universal biological principle paradigmatically exemplified by living organisms as biological agents that express their autonomy in a unity of adaptive purpose – the universal, objective, and ultimate behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish in the face of their conditions of existence (sometimes referred to in evolutionary biology as 'fitness maximization'). These goals may be met in both cognitive and non-cognitive ways: they are universal because these are characteristics demonstrated by all organisms, objective because they are a mind-independent fact, and ultimate because they are a summation of all proximate goals. While aberrations may be found, the biological axiom is a processual and agential definition that expresses with greater clarity than definitions describing structures, the necessary and sufficient ancestral agential characteristics that define all life. cf. organism, biological agent.
Biological goal - the object towards which the behavior of a biological agent is directed. Biological goals are the natural ends or limits of internally generated biological processes that follow transparent causal pathways - the development of a structure, maturation of an organism etc. Their sources may be mindless, minded but unconscious, or conscious. Short-term proximate goals serve long-term ultimate ends. Goal-directedness confers both purpose and agency. Biological goals are usually observed and studied as the behavioral outcomes of internal processes.
Biological object - something from the living world that can be studied scientifically; taken to be either a structure (whole or part), process, or behavior
Biological simile – a comparison (likeness) of biological phenomena that is based on real evolutionary connection
Bioteleological realism - the claim that purposes exist in nature and that most cognitive metaphors used in science are grounded in non-cognitive biological facts
Bioteleology - purpose resides in the fact that there are natural ends or limits to biological processes (e.g. the maturing of an acorn into an oak tree; the termination of a mating ritual in copulation), that these ends are objectively  goal-directed and therefore purposive. Teleonomy controversially interprets teleology as implying a metaphysically questionable source of purpose. The word teleonomy attempts to replace this purported implication with a naturalistic explanation. The distinction between teleology and teleonomy, and whether that distinction is warranted, remains unclear
Cognitive ethology – the study of the influence of conscious awareness and intention on the behavior of an animal
Cognitive metaphor - a metaphor used in the context of human intentional psychology. When we have no words to describe real pre-cognitive agential traits, we resort to the language of human cognition, thus condemning these traits to the figurative world of metaphor
Complementary properties – the properties instantiated by the relata of a biological simile
Conditions of existence (biology) - those factors influencing the inner processing of organisms including triggers arising from both inside and outside the organism.
Derived concept – a concept with a narrow semantic range
Emergence - as used here - the origin of novel objects, properties, or relations in the universe that warrant human categorization
Environmental factors - the external factors impacting on the existence of an organism
Evolutionary biology – the study of evolutionary processes (notably natural selection, common descent, speciation) that created the community of life
Fitness - a measure of reproductive success (survival) in relation to both the genotype and phenotype in a given environment
Function - also referred to as adaptive significance or purpose. In agential terms it helps to regard the characters of organisms as having functions while organisms themselves, as independent agents, have purposes and goals
Genotype - the genetic constitution of an individual organism, encoded in the nucleus of every cell
Grounding concept – the general ideas that underpin more specific (derived) concepts
Heuristic – stimulating interest and investigation
Holobiont – an aggregation of the host and all of its symbiotic microorganisms
Homeorhesis - (Gk - similar flow) a term applied to dynamic systems that return to a specific path or trajectory, in contrast with systems that return to a particular state (homeostasis). Homeostasis refers to the maintenance of a stable internal environment in response to external changes (e.g. body temperature in mammals) while homeorhesis is the adjustment, sometimes changing over time, to meet particular organismal functions or goals (e.g. changes in blood composition that support the fetus during pregnancy).
Homology – a similarity in the structure, physiology, or development of different species of organisms based upon their descent from a common evolutionary ancestor
Human agency - behavior motivated by conscious intention; the uniquely human specialized form of biological agency that is described using the human agential language of intentional psychology; the capacity to act based on reasons as cognitive and motivational states (beliefs, desires, attitudes) (philosopher Kim)
Human-talk - the language of humanization - the attribution of human characteristics to non-human organisms, objects, and ideas. (Biology) the description of non-human organisms using language that is usually restricted to humans and human intentional psychology; the use of cognitive metaphor to describe non-cognitive but real biological agency; the psychologizing of adaptive explanations
Intention - a cognitive goal, or pre-cognitive behavior that is directed towards objects, properties, or states of affairs
Intentional idiom - the use of intentional language in a wide range of contexts including those relating to non-human organisms
Life – units of matter with the agential capacity to survive, reproduce, and flourish (cf. biological axiom) as best exemplified by autonomous organisms. Life processes, such as growth, reproduction, response to stimuli, and metabolism are subordinate to the organismal wholes of which they are a part
Metabolism - the set of processes that sustains an organism (or, more generally, any biological system)
Metaphor - figurative language as ‘nonliteral comparisons in which a word or phrase from one domain of experience is applied to another domain’. An 'as if' direct (not a 'like') comparison that is not grounded in reality e.g. 'You are a rat'.
Natural agency - any agency in the natural world
Natural purpose - the natural goals, ends, or limits of biological agents, both cognitive and non-cognitive
Normative realism - the view that normativity has its origin in biology through the mindless and mindful ultimate goals of survival and reproduction, and proximate goal of flourishing
Organism - unicellular to multicellular life forms that include fungi, plants, and animals. The mostly physically bounded and functionally organized basic unit of life and evolution. As a mostly autonomous biological agent the organism acts on, and responds to, its conditions of existence with flexible but unified and goal-directed behavior that demonstrates the objective, ultimate, and universal propensity of organisms to survive, reproduce, and flourish. While life can be described at many scales and from many perspectives (and the structures, processes, and behaviors of organisms all demonstrate a degree of autonomy), it is the entire organism that provides the agential reference point of life - whose autonomy is both intuitively and scientifically most discrete. Exceptional cases such as lichens, Portuguese Men-o-War, the Great Barrier Reef, sexually aberrant variants etc., do not erode these core characteristics.
Organismal factors - the internal factors impacting the existence of an organism
Personification - the representation of something in the form of a person
Phenotype - the set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment
Physical reductionism - the view that biological phenomena can be adequately explained in terms of physico-chemical entities
Pre-cognition - all organisms are goal-directed autonomous biological agents that act on and respond to their conditions of existence in a flexible way. Agency is usually associated with human cognitive traits like intention and deliberation. However, the presence of agency in non-cognitive organisms confirms the presence of non-cognitive agential traits, a characteristic of non-cognitive organisms that distinguishes them from inanimate and dead objects. These non-cognitive agential traits are referred to here as pre-cognition.
Process ontology – it is processes that create phenomena including emergent and ephemeral ‘things’ which are derived from processes as transient and cohesive patterns of stability within the general flux. Thus, things are derivative of processes. In practical terms this does not mean that things do not exist or are not useful concepts. However, instead of thinking of processes as belonging to things, it is more scientifically informative to think of things as derived from processes. Organisms are prime examples of transient things in process
Purpose – the reason (end, aim, or goal) why something exists or is done, made, used etc.; (biology) the goal of a biological agent, paradigmatically a living organism, but also the natural end-state, limit, or reason for a structure, process, or behavior (often referred to in this sense as a function). In humans, purposes can assume a cognitive form as mental representations (conscious intentions); what something is 'for'; Aristotle's final cause or telos. Purposes, as the goals or ends of organisms and their parts, are an emergent and agential property of life that preceded human cognition: causal (etiological) explanations of purpose do not explain it away. Darwin did not remove agency and purpose from nature, he showed how they generated a process of natural selection.
Proximate explanation - an explanation dealing with immediate circumstances
Relata – the objects of a comparison
Semantic range – the degree of generality or abstraction encompassed in the meaning of a word - range of objects and ideas encompassed by its meaning
Synapomorphy - a characteristic present in an ancestral species and shared exclusively (in more or less modified form) by its evolutionary descendants
Teleology - the philosophical concept of purpose and design in the natural world. The claim that natural phenomena occur for reasons as natural ends or purposes that are neither necessitated by human or supernatural intention nor implying backward causation or foresight. For teleology in biology see bioteleology. The article on bioteleology discusses 8 senses of 'teleology'
Teleonomy - see bioteleology
Trait - a unit of the phenotype (physical or behavioral)
Ultimate explanation - a long-term explanation (e.g. in biology as a measure of the fitness of a particular trait)
Umwelt - the environment of adaptive significance for a particular organism: those factors that are important for its survival, reproduction, and flourishing: its mode of experience or 'reality'. For humans, this is the commonsense world of everyday experience (cf. manifest image) that is mostly a consequence of our innate mental processing which is, in turn, a consequence of our uniquely human evolutionary history
Values – (biological agency) that which ultimately motivates the behavior of biological agents (living organisms), namely the universal and objective goals of the biological axiom. Human agency - the proximate and subjective attitudes, beliefs, and inclinations that guide human behavior

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First published on the internet 1 September 2022 – using relevant material from existing articles
. . . 8 October 2023 – revision