A philosophy of biology
X-Ray image of stingray
Like all organisms the stingray expresses life through its flexible and goal-directed behavior. As an autonomous biological agent the stingray acts on, and responds to, its surroundings: its structures, processes, and behaviors are united in their universal, objective, and ultimate orientation towards survival, reproduction, and flourishing (biological axiom). These goals are universal because they are expressed by all organisms; objective because they are a mind-independent empirical fact; and ultimate because they are a summation and unification of all proximate goals.[2]
Goal-directed behavior is purposive behavior that does not necessarily imply supernatural influence, conscious intention, or backward causation. The intricate beauty of this functionally organized organism involves a complexity of design that far exceeds human ingenuity. This is design that evolved mindlessly under the influence of biological agency, the same mindless agency that gave rise to the human body, brain, and subjectivity
Image courtesy loctrizzle – http://imgur.com/gallery/bZbHmJA – Accessed – 22 Mar 2019
This web site has, in a series of articles, developed a philosophy of biology. This article first introduces the reader to the philosophy of biology before briefly outlining the contents and conclusions of other articles which are summarized at the end of this article as a collection of biological desiderata.
The philosophy of biology
The philosophy of biology emerged as an independent academic discipline – a branch of the philosophy of science – under the influence of a handful of academic philosophers, mostly from North America, in the 1970s, perhaps the most notable being David Hull (1935-2010) of Indiana University. This opened the door to an international exchange of ideas in the more speculative and controversial aspects of biology.
The philosophy of biology deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences,[3] its subject-matter also described by the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (see references below) as ‘general questions about the nature of science, conceptual problems within biology, and traditional philosophical questions that seem open to illumination from the biosciences‘.
Of special interest have been philosophical questions in taxonomy, evolutionary theory, genetics, and the relation between the ‘hard’ sciences of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, the ‘soft’ biological sciences, and the ‘even softer’ social sciences, economic science. Of contemporary interest there are problems relating to biological agency, consciousness, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and questions in the philosophy of mind.
Like other disciplines, the philosophy of biology needed an instrument of communication between its practitioners. The journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences was introduced in 1979 and in 1986 the journal Biology and Philosophy was launched, followed by Biological Theory, Philosophy and Practice of Biology, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Journal of the History of Biology.
The major international society is The International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology.
Four modern introductions to the philosophy of biology provide an extensive account of the history of biological ideas, the kinds of topics studied, and the literature associated with the discipline: Wikipedia gives a brief introductory overview; the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry by another founder of the modern discipline, Anglo-Canadian Michael Ruse, provides a more extensive overview of topics addressed in the early history of the subject; the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy account by Italian Emanuele Serrelli casts a wide net over the topic but brings extensive historical detail to bear; a recent overview by Jay Odenbaugh and Paul Griffiths is given in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy account (2020).
Philosophical framework
It is conventional to introduce academic subjects by discussing the history and development of its key ideas before discussing topics of current interest. This website adopts a more challenging approach by adopting a particular viewpoint dogmatically, thus challenging the reader to explore contrary views for themselves.
A short contextual introduction cannot, however, be avoided.
Biology
Biology is the study of life.
Two men established the foundational ideas around which biological science has subsequently been built. These men were Aristotle and Charles Darwin and the ideas they introduced revolved around biological agency and biological evolution (although Darwin initially avoided the word ‘evolution’).
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) circumscribed the field of biology by drawing attention to a special kind of agency. He described how organisms behave in a flexible and autonomous way – as goal-directed units of matter with an independence best described today as ‘agency’ – the propensity to survive and reproduce while adapting to their conditions of existence. The goal-directed behavioral predisposition of entire organisms ultimately accounted for the operations of the structures, processes, and behavior that were the means of attaining these goals.
It was this inherited agential precondition of organisms that made evolution possible, although it would be over 2000 years before English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) showed that (with the implicit assumption of Aristotle’s intrinsic agency) the evolution of organisms proceeded as a process of modification from common ancestors by natural selection. Darwin (and subsequent biology), by taking the agency of living organisms for granted, provided a naturalistic account of the origin of the entire community of life.
For Aristotle the structures, processes and behaviors of organisms were orientated towards ‘ends’ in a way that was not found in inanimate objects. Being agents, organisms were not passive to circumstance; they acted on, and responded to, their environments in a directed way – they assumed a ‘stance’, or ‘attitude’ towards their surroundings – and, as agents they were animated actors, they were not just ‘being’, they were ‘doing’ – engaged with their conditions in an interactive ‘process’ of a kind that was not found in inanimate nature.
Though they were (mostly) mindless, they were real agents because they had an active behavioral orientation or ‘perspective’ on their existence.
Aristotle also pointed out that, since all organisms were biological agents, a full and compelling explanation of organisms and their parts must answer the question ‘What is it for?’. That is, biological explanations were uniquely focused on the ‘ends’ of the agents they described, a characteristic known as teleology. Teleology makes sense when describing biological agents, while asking what the moon or a rock is ‘for’ does not – because inanimate objects, and the dead, lack biological agency.
More than this. The structures, processes, and behaviors were determined by (a consequence of) these goals. Without understanding what they were ‘for’ it was not possible to provide compelling and full biological explanations.
Aristotle also noticed that living organisms had the behavioral propensity to persist, not only guarding their survival over their own lifetime, but replicating their kind over many generations. In the biological world, like begets like.
Aristotle knew that there must be some internal biological mechanism accounting for biological agency, but in the absence of such an account subsequent scientists treated his entelechy as a mysterious and supernatural life-force that is best ignored.
Only in the mid-19th century did Englishman Charles Darwin provide a convincing alternative to the prevailing view that God had created each individual species of organism. His theory of natural selection was a compelling account of the way that the entire community of life had evolved by modification from common ancestors. While providing an account of the behavioral mechanism for change, the neo-Darwinian account of the physical mechanism of heredity would not be established until the close of the century, and the molecular account of the genetic code in 1953.
Without the tacit understanding of biological agency as a universal propensity to survive and reproduce, Darwin’s subsequent account of organic change by natural selection had nothing on which to build, since it was agency that made evolution possible.
It is astounding that, to this day, Aristotle’s central biological notion of living agency is regarded as mistaken, and therefore ignored.
Principle – biological science developed around the two key ideas of biological agency and evolution by natural selection
A philosophy
Scientists avoid philosophy because it seems to entail the unproductive pursuit of insoluble problems: it does not appear to make progress. The strength of empiricism is its reliance on the evidence of experiment and observation as a means for genuine intellectual progress, and scientists are quick to point out the practical technological applications of sound scientific research.
Groundwork
But all science rests on metaphysical assumptions and anyone who is curious about the world will, at some time or another, feel the need to visit these assumptions and intuitions.
If you study the philosophy of biology you will probably explore a disparate range of historical and contemporary problems in the philosophy of science and various issues of topical interest, especially in relation to evolution and microbiology in its many forms.
One way of getting seriously acquainted with this topic is to devise your own coherent philosophy of biology. For philosophers, grand philosophical schemes are out of fashion, but this is surely the tacit agenda of biological science. Just as an organism is an integrated whole, so too the philosophy of biology: ideas must and together as well as in isolation. Besides, such an attempt sends us on an exciting journey through the history of biological ideas.
This web site takes this grand scheme approach by beginning, in this article, with grounding ideas in the general philosophy of science as it relates to biology. It then concentrates on philosophical issues emerging out of the foundational thinking of Aristotle and Darwin – mostly the unfashionable Aristotelian idea of biological agency.
The articles on this web site are introduced in the article on biological explanation. These articles investigate the theme of Aristotle’s agency in biology, and its relationship to human agency. These articles include: What is life? – the crucial role of agency in determining purposes, values, and what it is to be alive; Purpose – the semantic link between agency and purpose including a brief history of teleology; Biological agency – a description 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 the behavioral propensities of the biological axiom (biological normativity); Evolution of biological agency – the evolutionary emergence of human agency out of biological agency.
One of the major conclusions is that the language of human agency has not taken account of its grounding in biological agency – and that a clarification of the concepts of biological agency and human agency would entail some conceptual merging of common linguistic usage. Though word meanings cannot be changed at will, in science it is possible to refine categories and concepts to better represent the world.
Realism or antirealism
Scientific realism entails a metaphysical commitment to the existence of a mind-independent reality; the semantic commitment to a literal interpretation of theories; and the epistemological commitment to regard theories as furnishing knowledge of both observables and unobservables.[1]
The PlantsPeoplePlanet position is that we perceive, understand, and explain the world through our senses and intellect as extended by technology. Though there is a world outside our bodies and minds there can be no mind-independent understanding of ‘things-in-themselves’. Establishing a reality requires a point of view or perspective, but we can only ever know things as they appear to us since we cannot adopt a ‘God-like’ or ‘point-of-view of the universe’ third-person perspective – a view from ‘no subject’, ‘no where’ and ‘no time’.[2] This does not mean that the external world is illusory and scientifically impenetrable, and that it must conform to our minds, nor that our explanations of it are unconstrained – only that it is, of necessity, a human interpretation (subject to the limits of human possibility) and therefore open to explanatory elaboration and improvement depending on purpose. The best scientific explanations are those that, by scientific consensus, have proved most reliable and have therefore generated a high degree of scientific confidence. The use of the word ‘truth’ has little scientific value except in this latter context.
This is an anti-realist pragmatism in which everything that exists outside human bodies and minds exists equally. It is human minds that segregate, classify, and rank the objects of the world.
Principle – anti-realist pragmatism recognizes an external world, but one in which everything that exists outside human bodies and minds exists equally. It is human minds that segregate, classify, and rank the objects of the world.
One or many?
Does the universe consist of one thing or many? Are you a monist or a pluralist?
Our common-sense intuition that ‘everything’ consists of multiple objects has been challenged by many alternative monist theories. It is a matter of philosophical speculation whether or not the universe ultimately consists of fundamental particles (modern physics), number (Pythagoras and followers), information (Paul Davies) or some other solitary thing. Perhaps there are just two things, mind and matter?
There is a futility about this debate as it seems we may be monists or pluralists depending on context, circumstance, and turn of phrase. It is easy to see how such a question can unleash a pandora’s box of interminable philosophical debate.
Emergence
In the late 20th century, an evidence-based scientific explanation of the origin and development of the universe was established.
At the moment of the Big Bang ‘everything’ emerged from a point source and it consisted, at first, of uniform plasma. Ontologically, whatever exists in the universe exists equally – without segregation, focus, classification, or priority – qualities which are imposed on the universe by the human mind. However, a scientific epistemology (scientific knowledge and its mode mode of explanation and understanding) From this uniform plasma emerged what science has treated as a myriad of objects in an infinity of properties, and relations. Science does not treat these as fictional creations of the human mind, instead it treats them as highly corroborated entities that are open to further investigation and clarification.
To practice science, we accept multiplicity and diversity. Even if ‘everything there is‘ is composed of quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons, and their forces . . . science takes a wider view of reality. These particles are building blocks of explanations but are no more real than the objects made up of their aggregation.
The view presented on this web site is that our best explanations of the universe take account of the influence of the human mind on our understanding, but that science legitimately claims that, over time, novel arrangements of matter with new properties and relations emerged out of what had existed before and that these novelties are proper subjects for scientific research.
Principle – science investigates, and legitimately treats as ‘real’, a wide range of objects, properties, and relations
Objects & processes
Does the universe ultimately consist of objects, or processes, or both – or something else?
There is an unsettling aspect to this question because
Processes
Aristotle was a biologist who perceived the universe through the metaphor of the whole organism as a goal-directed agent.
He viewed the world and its contents as organized in a hierarchical way (the ladder-like Great Chain of Being, like a ladder of existential significance or moral worth) – a metaphorical cosmology later adopted by Christianity – in which God and spirit were at the ‘top’, followed by humans, sentient animals, plants, and inanimate matter at the ‘bottom’.
Objects
The Scientific Revolution replaced this teleological account with the metaphor of a machine and matter in motion. Contemporary science has, in a sense, inverted Aristotle’s hierarchy by making the smallest known ‘fundamental’ particles the most important constituents of the universe.
It is a quirk of the human mind that it must rank the objects of its experience in preparation for action. The Scientific Revolution, and later analytic philosophy, adopted analysis as a methodological procedure, leading science and philosophy on a quest for the smallest conceivable ‘fundamental’ particles of matter and thought.[4]
Generative atomism is the belief that there are fundamental elements out of which a particular system is constructed – whether it be the physical world, language, logic, or something else. From these fundamental objects (particles, or words, say) all other objects are constructed. The basic objects must be indivisible, countable, and immutable (this property is lost with ontological emergence) and there may be a fixed set of rules from which things are generated. This was a mode of thinking resembling the ideal of a mathematical axiomatic system.
A car assembly line has specific rules for the construction of a car (see also Russell’s logical atomism and Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning)
Physics, logic, and biology had set out in search of the foundational building blocks of ‘everything’.
Our minds seem to perceive the world in two distinct modes, one static and the other dynamic. There is the actual dynamic world of particulars – of physical objects like biscuits, cars, trees, and mountains – which are subject to constant process and change (albeit on various time scales). Then there is a realm of abstract concepts or qualities, which Ancient Greek philosopher Plato believed existed as unchanging universals, the static mental representations of these and other things as they occur in language and the mind.
Plato, referred to the realm of eternal, unchanging, and perfect forms or ideas as the world of ‘being’, while philosopher Heraclitus emphasized the world of ‘becoming’ as process, flux, and change – ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’, he said.
PlantsPeoplePlanet argues that since we live in a world of flux and change, it is process philosophy that will yield the most productive scientific outcomes. However, our minds require the stable concepts of ‘being’ if they are to operate effectively.
But what is the role of mind in our scientific explanation and understanding of the world?
We find it difficult to explain an object in terms of itself. But when we explain it in other terms, it takes on the character of those other terms.
Each scientific object exists in its own right. But if we are to capture, in the most succinct words, what it is then we must choose our words carefully. Is gold a glittering yellow metal, or is it the element with atomic number 79? If scientific precision is our goal, then determining the atomic number of this metal was a major scientific breakthrough in clarity. In this instance atomic number provides us with what Aristotle might have called gold’s scientific ‘essence’.
Mind & world
A central question in the philosophy of science concerns the role of mind in our description of the world.
We might ask, for example, what properties exist in the world and what properties exist only in our minds?
English philosopher John Locke recognized primary qualities as real objective properties existing in the world e.g. size, figure, extension, duration, motion, position, and secondary qualities in some way —metaphysically, epistemically, linguistically—derivative, less than fully real, or otherwise metaphysically feeble; or misleading, subjective, ambiguous, or otherwise not perspicuous like color, taste, odor, sound, heat, coldness, and tactual qualities such as hardness, softness, roughness and smoothness.
Aristotle suggested ten key categories that could be used to facilitate enquiry. These summarized the various ways in which things in the world could be said to exist or to be predicated: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, situation, condition, action, and passion.
In the 18th century Immanuel Kant’s philosophical Copernican Revolution challenged the ‘spectator’ view of science in which the mind conformed to the world (that is, the mind discovered objective realities in the world) with the view that the world conforms to the mind (that is, the mind structures or frames the way we see and understand the world). His ‘pure concepts of the understanding’ – what might be called innate characteristics of the mind, were the transcendental aesthetic, which framed all perception within space and time, and the transcendental analytic as 12 categories in four groups: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, causality, reciprocity), and modality (possibility, existence, necessity) as foundational ways in which we structure and make sense of the world.
While Aristotle’s categories attempted to capture the nature of reality, Kant assumed his categories were the mental preconditions required for us to experience the world as we do.
This is a central question for both philosophy and science. What exactly is the connection between the external world and the way it is represented in our minds?
Mental processing
The philosophy of biology in PlantsPeoplePlanet takes a Kantian view of the world. However, since the innate faculties of the mind appear limitless, this complexity is reduced to just four key characteristics of mental processing, treated as the necessary preconditions for human experience:
1) Segregation – to think and experience is to think and experience something (sometimes called intentionality). Mental activity is always about something, it divides the world into mental categories as meaningful representational units, both those of perception (percepts) and those of cognition (concepts)
2) Focus – our minds simplify awareness of the multitude of these mental categories by restricting our awareness, at any given time, to a small proportion of those available. That is, mental categories are organized into a foreground and background
3) Classification – mental categories are not experienced passively, they are grouped (classified) according to similarities and differences that depend on the purpose of the classification and objectives of the agent
4) Valuation (ranking) – our lives depend not only on arranging mental categories into meaningful groups, but also on ranking these groups according to purpose. That is, we are constantly making choices, and this entails not only mental taxonomy but ranked taxonomy (as valuation, prioritization, selection) based on our needs, desires, purposes, and reasons
Earlier, it was argued that everything in the universe exists equally. But to behave as an agent in the world entails the prioritization of the objects of experience as a prelude to action – the adoption of a ‘perspective’. As humans we are familiar with the ranking and valuing of the objects of our experience as a mental process, but all living organisms display behavioral orientations to their surroundings, even those without nervous systems. All organisms adapt, and each organism exists in its own umweldt (its reality, as those factors on which its survival, reproduction, and flourishing depend). The brain is simply a highly evolved and complex uniquely human mechanism facilitating adaptation.
While the relationship between our mental representations and the world are a matter of philosophical dispute, if we are to proceed in the world then our minds must: segregate the world into meaningful representational units, focus on a limited range of these, classify representations according to similarities and differences, and prioritize these units in relation to interests and actions.
These are the mental preconditions for our survival: they reduce the buzzing multiplicity and confusion of sensory input into meaningful experience. Also, they happen automatically – they must, of necessity, be part of our hard-wiring, our biological make-up.
But we also reduce complexity in conscious ways.
Principle – segregate the world into meaningful representational units, focus on a limited range of these, compare and classify them according to similarities and differences, and prioritize them in relation to interests and action in the world
Explanation
Explanations are ways of helping us to understand phenomena, generally by providing an account of what it is that is responsible for them – what we refer to conveniently as ‘causes’.
Aristotle distinguished four kinds of explanation (his four causes) – material (what the object of investigation is made of), formal (its key defining features), efficient (its origin), and final (what it is for). These correspond approximately to today’s interrelated causal, e.g. the cause of a disease; functional, e.g. functional of human the lungs; mechanistic, e.g. the mechanism of photosynthesis, and teleological, e.g. the purpose, ends or limits of phenomena – what the wings of birds or fins of fish are for.
Not only may there be multiple causes for phenomena, but some causes may be subsumed under others. One well-known example distinguishes between proximate and ultimate causes of traits.[5] The colorful plumage of birds, for example, may be explained in terms of the physiological and developmental processes involving pigmentation (proximate explanation) or the role played by plumage in evolutionary sexual selection. There may therefore be multiple explanations of a given phenomenon that do not conflict. The question is not about which explanation is correct, but which explanation provides the most compelling answer to the question being posed. However, it is easy to ignore the role of causes operating at more inclusive scales when investigations seek answers through analysis. The fate of organisms rests on the behavioral responses to their conditions of existence but we tend to regard genes as causal initiators.
Analysis & synthesis
It is a characteristic of explanation that we do not explain something in terms of itself: explanations tend to proceed either to component parts or to the place of the object as a part within a wider context or whole. The parts that we choose to explain wholes are those that are meaningful within the particular context. I don’t explain a rise in interest rates in physicochemical terms, even if such an explanation was theoretically possible.
So, if I am asked to explain what a car is, I could describe how all the parts work together to provide a vehicle of transport, or I could explain how a car is one of many kinds of transport within a transport system. Using metaphorical hierarchy-talk, explanations can proceed in two ‘directions’ – by ‘upward’ synthesis or ‘downward’ analysis. Almost any item in the universe can be divided into smaller parts or united into larger wholes, and that is a major mode of explanation how we explain things. Expressed in other words: every object is simultaneously both a part and a whole.
When a whole is explained in terms of its parts we refer to this as analysis. Analysis adopts the mental perspective of the whole. It is the whole that is, as it were, demanding the explanation.
When we explain something (as a part) in terms of a wider whole or context we refer to this as synthesis. Synthesis thus adopts the mental perspective of a part within a greater whole.
So, ‘A house is an assemblage of bricks‘ (analysis). ‘Legs give my body mobility‘ (synthesis).
Since very object is both a whole and a part, it can be either analyzed into progressively smaller and smaller or less inclusive parts in an infinite analytical regress (or until a least-inclusive ‘rock bottom’ is reached), or synthesized into ever more inclusive wholes in an infinite synthetic regress (or until an all-inclusive ‘rock top’ is reached).
This raises interesting questions and possibilities concerning the metaphorical symmetry of explanation.
With the whole functioning organism (biological agent) as the basic biological unit, explanations of structures, processes, and behaviors tend towards synthesis, with the biological agent and its goals the ultimate reference point or focus. Organisms, like every physical object, are comprised of parts whose significance and operation is discovered by means of analysis, but they have, in addition, the property of agency: that is, they express the goal-directed behavior that is absent from non-living objects. It is the strength of biological and human agency, the focus of their existence on ends, that drives explanations ‘forwards’ towards synthesis, towards the understanding, not of parts, but overall agency. It is the desire to understand the workings of an agent rather than a passive whole that gives biological explanation direction. A heap of sand, a molecule of salt, and quartz crystal are ‘wholes’ – but we do not ask what they are ‘for’, or try to understand their goals. But a description of an organism that excludes the agency expressed by its autonomous functional organization places it in the realm of the inanimate and dead. This is not scientifically acceptable.
Of course, sub-disciplines of biology have their own proximate reference points – anatomy – the organs, genetics – the gene, biochemistry – the organic molecular composition, physiology – the functional process, endocrinology – hormones, and so on. People working in these disciplines might understandably voice strong opinions about the explanatory significance of their work which may be ground-breaking in the field. However, the
A car is not a living object, but it is a product of human goals: the agency of car does not come from its own internal resources but is derived externally from human intention.
Principle – our minds focus on units of experience and thought, some of which are representations of the external world. Science attempts to maximize the intelligibility of the relationship between our representations and the external world
Analytical reductionism
The Western world has, for several hundred years, placed great emphasis on analysis as a preferred procedure of explanation. This preoccupation with analysis has not been seriously questioned but is taken for granted as a given method.
Bertrand Russell, who had a profound influence on English-speaking philosophy, describes this ‘direction’ of explanation as follows:
‘. . . the last of my initial prejudices, which has been perhaps the most important in all my thinking. This is concerned with method’ . . . ‘to start from something vague but puzzling, something indubitable but which I cannot express with any precision. I go through a process which is like that of first seeing something with the naked eye and then examining it through a microscope. I find that by fixity of attention divisions and distinctions appear where none were at first visible . . . analysis gives new knowledge without destroying any of the previously existing knowledge. This applies not only to the structure of physical things, but quite as much to concepts . . . belief in the above process is my strongest and most unshakable prejudice as regards the methods of philosophical investigation’.[3]
Russell was echoing the second principle of Descartes:
‘ . . . to divide each of the difficulties that I was examining into as many parts as might be possible and necessary in order best to solve it’.
These two men were founding fathers of a Western intellectual tradition, sometimes called analytical reductionism, which prioritized intellectual investigation by analysis.
It is a method that lies at the core of scientific procedure and gives its name to a strong tradition in Western philosophy – ‘analytic philosophy’. The principle is simple: to comprehend or explain either a physical object or a concept (a whole) we must investigate its parts and their relations.
Focus of thought
All things may exist equally, but if we are to survive then our minds must segregate, focus, classify, and prioritize.
Rather than thinking of science hierarchically as investigating the world according to ‘levels of organization’ we can think of it in terms of our focus of attention. The problem with hierarchies is that they are usually strongly ranked, and if everything in nature exists equally then this can be misleading.
Let’s extend, using a thought experiment, Russell’s analogy of the microscope as a means of achieving explanatory focus.
Imagine you have an extremely powerful new scientific instrument like a combined microscope and telescope – we can call it a micro-macroscope. The first objects you see as you look into the instrument have no recognizable form. We can call them molecules. But when you adjust the instrument by zooming out you see the molecules seeming to coalesce into something that looks like a leg, then zooming out further you see that the previous object really was a leg, that the leg belongs to a person, zooming out more we see that the person is one among many people living in a city, which is part of a country, which is part of planet Earth, which is part of the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe. Perhaps you can also imagine a scientific future when further objects can be added at the limits of this caricature – at one extreme much smaller objects, smaller than fermions and bosons, and at the other extreme our universe merging into a multiverse.
The micro-macroscope gives us a way of thinking about the different academic disciplines of science. It allows us to look at the landscape of the universe both ‘up’ and ‘down’, viewing the same scenery, but from different scales and perspectives.
The point is that there is no ‘right’, ‘true’, or ‘more scientific’ focus to the world, just different ways of understanding and explaining. Unfortunately, hierarchy-talk of ‘levels’ can cloud this understanding as our mental inclination to rank objects leads to an emphasis on the size or inclusiveness of objects in the world.
Principle – the size or inclusiveness of physical units is no measure of reality (ontology) – a daffodil is as real as an electron, their differentiation is useful only as a means of explanation (epistemology). There are no ‘levels of existence’ only ‘a focus of explanation’
Principle – our minds focus on units of experience and thought, some of which are representations of the external world. Science attempts to maximize the intelligibility of the relationship between our representations and the external world
Grounding categories
Thinking is facilitated by the minimization of complexity – the reduction of the many to the few. The categories of both Aristotle and Kant attempted to ‘reduce’ many concepts to few based on similarities and differences.
We need units of thought – let’s call them concepts. As a matter of psychological necessity, we use concepts of generality and particularity. We might call this the detail or grain of our thought. Examples of very general concepts would be matter, space, time, or music. Then, to establish particularity, it becomes psychologically helpful to break up the generalities into units that act as building blocks out of which we can then construct a framework of thought.
These units are standards or yardsticks against which we measure and construct other things. Sometimes there seems to be a single foundational unit, like the atom of Democritus, the brick of a house, or the biological notoriously-difficult-to-define species. Biologically at the microscopic scale we have cells. Sometimes we just use a range of convenient units without placing emphasis on one as being fundamental to all the others. The unit of music is the crotchet, perhaps (whole note), as a foundational note that can be added to, or subdivided. The unit of time is, perhaps, the second or minute, while ‘now’ is contentious. Number systems seem to rest on the building block of a single unit, number one. Spatial measures, like centimetres, metres, miles and so on, seem to lack a foundational unit.
Perhaps it is a feature of our mental processing that we need objects to which we tether our thoughts. And, since we intuitively recognize the importance of these anchors, they take on special significance in our experience.
Principle 1 – our minds focus on units of experience and thought, some of which are representations of the external world. Science attempts to maximize the intelligibility of the relationship between our representations and the external world
Philosophical framework
Biological science developed around two key ideas, that of biological agency – the life-defining goal-directed behavior encompassed by Aristotelian teleology, and the process of physical change that occurs over many generations as evolution by modification from common ancestors by means of natural selection: Charles Darwin’s account of the origin and development of the entire community of life based on Aristotelian agency.
The metaphysical basis for this particular philosophy of biology is an anti-realist pragmatism which recognizes the reality of an external world in which everything that exists outside human bodies and minds exists equally. It is the human mind that provides a meaningful experience of this external world through the way it segregates, focuses, classifies, and ranks the objects of the external world.
Our interpretation of what happened after the Big Bang is imposed on the world by our human mental predisposition to segregate, focus, classify, and rank the elements of our experience.
One effective way of segregating the world was provided by Aristotle who divided all that existed into three things: objects, their properties, and their relations.
From the time of the Big Bang the human mind has discriminated the emergence of novel arrangements of matter with new properties and relations. None of these novelties is existentially privileged, but explanatory privilege has facilitated scientific explanation.
Organisms as agential wholes (functionally organized autonomous units of matter) are, in a strong sense, the primary objects of biological investigation. While biology has fragmented into diverse disciplines examining life from many scales and perspectives, it is the organism, as an operational unit, to which explanatory attention is ultimately drawn.
(Biology has been characterized as a ‘special science’ (a term that originated with the logical positivist (later logical empiricist) philosophy of science that was amenable to a reduction of biology to physics. [4], as a ‘soft’ science
Epilogue
The following list provides a condensed account of the key concepts discussed in the articles listed at the head of this article. See also the article called biological desiderata for a narrative account of these claims.
Biology
Biology is the study of life. The basic physical unit of life is the organism, whose basic unit of composition is the cell. The basic unit of biological classification is the species.
Life
Life is studied from many perspectives (physiological, thermodynamic, biochemical, genetic etc.) and on many scales (from molecules to populations and ecosystems etc.). From a human perspective, it is most easily comprehended in terms of autonomous organisms whose structures, processes, and behaviors are unified in the agential propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish. It is this biological agency that most obviously distinguishes the living from the inanimate and dead.
Biological explanation
Biological explanations are grounded in two key ideas: the agential goal-directedness of autonomous organisms (the biological agency of Aristotelian teleology), and the temporal unity of the community of life due to its origin by natural selection from a common ancestor (Darwinian evolution).
Algorithm of life
Organisms are autonomous units of matter that self-replicate while incorporating feedback from the environment, thus enabling the possibility for individual change, but with a continuity of kind.
Organism
Is there empirical evidence for a preferred ranking of biological objects, or is this a subjective matter that depends on our individual interests and concerns? The interdependencies in biology are so strong that several candidates emerge as potential biological building blocks, the most notable being the cell, the gene, and the organism.
All organisms are composed of cells that have autonomy because they can perform the processes necessary for life, such as metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis, and the transmission of genetic information. Indeed, multicellularity probably evolved out of unicells by means of natural selection. Are cells the basic building blocks of life?
Genes play a crucial role in heredity and the functioning of cells, but they are not capable of independent existence.
It is the agential autonomy of organisms that stands out, even though they themselves have wider dependencies within more inclusive frames – populations of their own species within a wider environmental context.
It is the concentration of agency within readily identifiable physical units that is special and unique - their narrow agential ultimate focus on survival, reproduction, and flourishing. It is towards these goals that the structures, processes, and behavior of organisms are directed and therefore subordinated. This is what genes, cells, metabolism, growth, reproduction, and adaptation are ultimately for, and this is what singles out the organism as both an intuitive and natural autonomous category within the scheme of life.
The organism is the basic operational unit of biology, and therefore evolution, because it is the biological unit that displays most strongly the life-defining agential characteristics of the biological axiom – the universal, objective, and ultimate behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish. Short-term behavioral goals drive organisms to adapt and compete in the immediate present while, over the long-term (many generations) this behavior results in the natural selection of genetic traits that are passed on to future generations.
The biological axiom
Living organisms are biological agents that express their autonomy as a unity of agency and purpose - the universal, objective, and ultimate behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish when confronting their conditions of existence
The biological axiom observes that life is predicated on the survival, reproduction, and flourishing of organisms as autonomous agents.
This is a principle of life and its individuation. It states the necessary but conditional preconditions for life and how it is expressed through the integrated units of functional organization that we call organisms. As a statement of the objective goals of organisms it is a simple scientific statement of biological purpose.
Significantly, the goals of the biological axiom are mindless goals that are not the result of conscious deliberation; they are a precondition for life itself. Minds exist in bodies that are subordinate to bodily limitations and constraints.
The universal, objective, and ultimate goal-directed preconditions of the biological axiom are referred to here as biological agency. These goals are: universal because they are expressed by life as a whole; 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 minded organisms. For the individual organism, these conditions are temporary because death is a precondition for individual lives, but its kind (the species) has the conditional potential to persist indefinitely.
The biological axiom is an existential grounding statement for all forms of biological agency including human minded agency - as well as purpose, intention, knowledge, reason, and value.
Biological goals
The fact that the behavior of biological agents is goal-directed does not mean that the goals themselves have causal efficacy, or that goals must entail conscious intentions. Goals are simply a behavioral orientation directed towards some outcomes rather than others. In human terms this is an expression of value that underpins, but does not determine, moral decisions.
Biological agency
Biological agency is an inherited life-defining property of living organisms that is expressed in autonomous behavior - the capacity of whole living organisms to act on, and respond to, their conditions of existence in a unified way. They do so in flexible ways that can potentially facilitate or impede (help or hinder) their existence. This flexible goal-directed behavior is grounded in the universal, ultimate, and objective goals of survival, reproduction, and flourishing (the biological axiom). These goals constitute a unity of purpose towards which all organisms - including their structures, processes, and behaviors - are directed.
Thus, living organisms are not passive, like rocks: they demonstrate behavioral autonomy that facilitates factors that promote these universal goals, and resist factors that impede them. Organisms therefore demonstrate behavior that resembles a human 'perspective', 'attitude', or 'point of view' in relation to their conditions of existence: they display objective behavior that mindlessly promotes their continued existence. This mindless behavioral orientation is a fact or mode of existence that in human terms would be interpreted as a value - 'it is better to live than not live'. This is a form of 'biological normativity' and it is reasonable to assume that it is out of this behavioral propensity that human values evolved, and in which human values are grounded.
It is the tension between the propensity to autonomy and the constraints of circumstance that establish the distinction between living agent and environment (expressed in human form as the distinction between 'self' and 'other').
The central importance of action in the expression of agency places emphasis on behavior directed towards goals or ends that are the starting point for biological explanation, these ultimate goals relating more to whole organisms as beneficiaries although supported by in the pursuit of these goals by the functioning of their parts, processes and behaviors. Even mindless living organisms have the capacity to discriminate between the objects and processes of their inner and outer environments,[50] adapting to circumstances with a goal-directed unity of purpose. The behavioral flexibility grounded in the objectives of the biological axiom, expresses the biological agency that is at the heart of biological science and its explanations of the natural world. It is out of this mindless behavioral flexibility and agential autonomy that our human subjectivity as a minded conscious capacity to discriminate between 'self' and 'other' evolved.
Parts of organisms do not have goals in the same way that autonomous organisms have goals. It is helpful to distinguish between the unity of purpose of an entire organism, to which its structures, processes, and behaviors contribute, and the functions of its parts. While functions can be independently interpreted and assessed, they are, nevertheless, subordinate to ultimate biological goals.
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) 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 subjected to environmental selection.
The emergent properties of biological agency arose in nature in a naturalistic and causally transparent way (inherited variation with feedback) that did not imply either backward causation or the intentions of either humans or gods. These agential, purposive, and normative properties of organisms preceded people in evolutionary time: they existed in nature mindlessly. That is, the notions of 'purpose', 'value', and 'agency' as described here, can refer to both minded and mind-independent conditions.
Agency has two key components: abstract goals that are expressed as a behavioral disposition, and the physical structures and processes that manifest these goals.
Agency & purpose
Goal-directed behavior is purposeful behavior - it is behavior for reasons or ends. The presence of goals need not imply the influence of God, the insinuation of human intent, or backward causation. Goal-directedness in nature is real, and without understanding the reasons for (purposes of) an organism's behavior as goals - including the role played by structures, processes, and behaviors in the attainment of these goals - biological explanation becomes an incoherent listing of dissociated facts.
Emphasis on ends may be interpreted as implying an unnatural backward causation or pull from the future. This is a quirk of explanation. Only when the ultimate goals expressed by the functional organization of a whole organism are appreciated can the roles of its necessitating parts and functions be fully understood. In this way biological ends have explanatory priority (hence the ‘final cause’ associated with teleology) but they do not challenge the natural order of cause and effect.
In a comparable way, the internal processing that initiates the behavior of organisms only becomes meaningful in terms of the behavior it generates. Behavior is explanatorily prior to the inner processing that initiates it (whether mental or other).
We ask about purposes and functions in biology precisely because organisms are agents. We do not ask what the moon or rocks are 'for', because they do not behave in a purposeful agential way.
Mindless biological purposes preceded, and gave rise to, the minded purposes we associate with human agency. That is, minded human agency evolved out of mindless biological agency. People did not create purpose and agency, it was the mindless purpose and agency in nature that gave rise to people - their bodies, brains, and minds.
The agential (goal-directed) orientation of biological behavior gives organisms a 'perspective' (albeit often a mindless one) on their existence such that their goals may be (mindlessly) helped or hindered.
Biological agency & human agency
Human minded agency evolved out of the mindless biological agency whose ultimate goals (behavioral propensities) were established billions of years before.
Biological agency and human agency are not mutually exclusive characteristics in the same way that we might regard organisms with minds as distinct from those without minds. That is, while human agency has uniquely minded characteristics it also shares the universal grounding characteristics of biological agency.
This may be compared to the way we accept that sexuality exists (almost) universally across the community of life, even though it is expressed in a wide range of behaviors and physical forms. Human sexuality is expressed in a uniquely human way, but this does not mean that only human sexuality is 'real', and that the sexuality of other organisms is only sexual-like.
Adaptation
The word ‘adaptation’ is used as both a verb denoting process (an organism adapting to its environment) and a noun (the eye is a complex adaptation). It is the latter that is generally applied in formal definitions such as 'an evolved phenotypic trait that enhances fitness'.
The process of adaptation has both short- and long-term components that are both determined by the ultimate goals of the biological axiom.
Short-term adaptation is behavioral adaptation; it is the compromise reached between the ultimate demands of the biological axiom and its conditions of existence. This is a real-time fine-tuning of behavior as an expression of organismal autonomy and is presumably what Darwin meant when he talked about the ‘struggle for life’. This struggle, over the long term, results inherited novelties as genetic adaptation resulting in evolutionary change. Over many generations, changes in structures, processes, or behaviors that enhance an organism's differential survival and reproduction based on their heritable traits (fitness maximization) are referred to as adaptations. It is a form of phenotypic control that occurs throughout the biological system but is expressed most obviously in the integrated goals of autonomous organisms. Behavioral adaptation, over the longer term, determines the heritable traits of structures, processes, or behaviors that affect an organism's survival and reproduction, and it is these heritable traits, that are called adaptations and are treated as being at the core of fitness maximization. In short, organisms are the canonical units enacting evolutionary change, even when change is expressed in non-organismal terms, such as the properties of genes.
Conditions of existence can facilitate or impede the attainment of behavioral goals, a consequence of the universal organismal behavioral orientation (biological axiom). As a biological agent, then, goals may be 'helped' or 'hindered' giving organisms a behavioral 'perspective' on life as a 'mindless value'. If desired, the implication of agency is avoided by either describing agential traits as dispositional properties or as etiological outcomes (an inevitable developmental or evolutionary outcome).
While not all traits are necessarily adaptive, or an outcome of natural selection (there may be other evolutionary processes involved) Darwin’s key concept of natural selection acting on heritable variation within a population remains the cornerstone of empirically based evolutionary theory.
Biological agency is a grounding notion for both single- and multiple-generation change. The language of adaptation, natural selection, selective pressure, fitness maximization, and evolution in general, are littered with words like ‘better’ and ‘worse’, ‘help’ and ‘hinder’, facilitate’ or ‘impede’, ‘benefits’ and ‘disadvantages’, 'strategies', and so on. The inappropriate use of anthropomorphism is an attempt to express the real but mindless biological agency that is still not fully acknowledged in biological science. While adaptation, like the behavior of most organisms, is neither deliberate nor conscious it is, nevertheless, the product of agential (goal-directed) behavior: that is, the notion of adaptation brings with it, of necessity, the notion of agency. The notion of fitness associated with adaptation is blatantly and inherently agential in character. Without the presumption of agency, the concepts of adaptation and natural selection are, to all intents and purposes, incoherent.
Aristotle gave Darwin the agential key that was needed to unlock the theory of evolution.
Proximate & ultimate goals
The multitude of operations/functions of structures, processes, and behaviors of organisms are all subordinate (proximate to) the ultimate and mindless goals of the biological axiom.
Human minded goals are, in this sense, only proximate goals that serve the whole-body ultimate and mindless goals of biological agency that had evolved billions of years before.
So, for example, we humans eat for minded proximate ends (taste and smell stimulation and the satiation of hunger), that have the mindless ultimate biological end of survival. We have sex for minded proximate ends (orgasm, physical and emotional gratification), but also for the mindless ultimate biological end of reproduction. We develop moral and political systems seeking the minded proximate ends of happiness, wellbeing, and pleasure, while serving the ultimate and mindless biological end of flourishing.
Physical & conceptual gradation
Before Darwin each species was regarded as a unique creation of God. Human bodies were the repositories of everlasting souls with the mind a special domain of religious and philosophical investigation. After Darwin (mid-19th century) the entire community of life was viewed as a graded continuum of organic kinds with the human brain and mind bodily elements open to scientific investigation. Harking back to this transition, it remains unclear whether some concepts relate strictly and exclusively to human minds and human agency or whether they share more generalized features with biological agency and the continuum of life.
Consider the sentence -
'The design we see in nature is only apparent design'.
We say that design in nature is ‘apparent’ (not real) because it is not human design, it is not created by human minds. But nature and organisms are replete with real designed structures in patterns more complex, beautiful, and ordered than anything created by humans. Mindless nature ‘created’ the miraculous and intricately integrated human body, including the brain that provides us with conscious representations of nature’s real design.
The problem is that, for many people, ‘design’ (and other words like ‘purpose’, ‘reason’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘value’) are strictly minded words appropriate only in the context of the human mind. Thus, the word ‘design’ is only used nervously in relation to organisms because it seems to imply that either mindless organisms have minds, or they were created by God. We overcome this semantic confusion with verbal obfuscation. We say that nature is 'design-like' or 'designoid'.
But the implication that without minds design is not possible is clearly, and obviously, mistaken.
Our anthropocentrism simply refuses to countenance the possibility of mindless design. We forget that in biology it is the mindless goals of the biological axiom that take precedence over their later evolutionary development, the intentions of the human mind, and that they can exist in nature in a graded way. Following philosopher Dan Dennett's mode of expression, we forget that . . . 'purpose’, ‘reason’, 'agency', ‘knowledge’, ‘value’, 'design' and many other concepts often attributed strictly to human minds (like consciousness) emerged out of the evolutionary process by degree: they 'bubbled up from the bottom, not trickled down from the top'.
Biological agency is not a fiction of the human mind, it 'created' human agency. Many of the concepts related strictly to human agency are best considered scientifically as sharing properties with biological agency and, in this sense, of existing in nature by degree.
Biological normativity
The biological axiom is simultaneously a statement of biological agency, biological purpose, and biological normativity. The normativity exists as a mindless perspective on existence expressed as a behavioral orientation that can be helped or hindered by circumstance. This is 'normative' behavior because as biological agents, organisms are not passive, they express 'preferences', and 'choices', albeit mindless ones.
As a statement of biological normativity the biological axiom expresses the objective, universal, and ultimate behavioural
orientation of all living organisms towards survival, reproduction, and flourishing over multiple generations. This behavioural orientation resembles a set of generalized and mindless rules for living, like a human code of conduct, and since these goals were the evolutionary precursors to human behavioral codes, they are appropriately referred to as biological normativity. But, as a mindless form of normativity, these biological values are not recommendations for behavior, or judgements about behavior, they are objective statements about the way organisms are.
Biological values are manifest differently in each biological agent. The physical structures, processes, and behaviors adopted by a spider to obtain its life energy, produce offspring, and flourish are very different from those of a sea urchin, eucalyptus tree, or the minded and proximate values of humans.
The mindless behaviour of the biological axiom is like (because evolutionarily related to) a human perspective or point of view. But the likeness is not the ‘as if’ similarity of metaphor but the reality of an evolutionary connection that warrants scientific recognition, since it is out of mindless biological values that human minded values evolved. This was the evolutionary precursor to human proximate minded goals that arise as both organismal biological desires and the culturally reasoned beliefs and codes that result from a critical examination of behavioural consequences. It is also why ultimate and objective biological goals can be expressed in human proximate subjective terms as the behavioural flexibility that allows organisms to exercise choices in relation to their interests.
Biological normativity and human normativity are not mutually exclusive. In behavioural terms, biological normativity is the lived expression of both unconscious (mindless) and conscious (minded) goals, where these occur. In humans they have taken on a highly evolved and minded form that includes reason.
Ethics (moral naturalism)
We often assume that judgements about what can 'help' or 'hinder' our lives, what makes a situation 'better' or 'worse', what is 'right' and 'wrong', 'good' and 'bad', are part of a human domain of subjective normative assessment that has little, if anything, to do with nature. How could it be otherwise? After all, nature itself does not think, it just is. Nature does not make moral decisions, or recommend codes of behaviour - that is nonsense. Moralities are obviously creations of human subjective deliberation, the application of what we call 'reason' as found only in human minds.
But . . .
We have inherited from nature a legacy of biological normativity as a behavioural orientation (a mindless 'code of conduct') - the behavioural goals of the biological axiom. When human minds evolved, along with their uniquely conscious and reasoning subjectivity, this universal, objective, and ultimate biological behavioural orientation was manifested in proximate minded form - in part as organismal needs, desires and intuitions, but also in part as cultural moral, and other, codes of behaviour - still grounded in ultimate biological normativity, but fine-tuned by reason. Moralities are human creations, but they are grounded in natural facts.
Aristotle's normative imperative
Biological agency expresses the 'values' (the quotes indicate an objective behavioural orientation) of survival, reproduction, and flourishing as a necessary condition for life. This is what it means to be a living organism - it is a biological necessity.
Aristotle maintained that the ultimate goals of biological agency drive us to the conclusion that – ‘It is better to exist than not exist‘, and ‘it is better to live than not live’ – referred to here as Aristotle’s biological normative imperative. Humans describe such statements as subjective value judgements that have no logical necessity. But as statements expressing the objective nature of all organisms, including humans, (but not in inanimate objects) they do express biological necessity.
Why do organisms have the propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish? . . . ‘Because natural selection made them so‘ (Armand Leroi[40]). Critically, and in apparent contradiction, this is not what organisms need to do, or ought to do (human subjective minded values); it is the way that they are (objective biological 'values'). It is out of these mindless values that evolution forged minded values.
Aristotle's normative imperative - the propensity of life, both individuals and kinds, to resist death - is an objective fact: it is not the projection of human subjective values onto life. Humans may make the minded and contestable value judgement, that 'it is good to live', but mindless organisms do not make value judgments, their biological 'normativity' is expressed in the way that they are. But humans, since they express both mindless biological agency (objective behavioural orientation) and minded human agency (subjective value) thus express both fact and value simultaneously (cf. the philosophical distinction between fact and value).
Fact & value
Our anthropocentric emphasis on the uniquely human trait of mindedness has contributed to an artificial intellectual gulf between humans and other organisms that has diminished the significance of our real biological connection. This can be attributed, in part, to the anthropocentric elevation of mindedness into a realm of values as a special mental and linguistic domain that stands in stark contrast to an unconnected realm of discourse that we call facts.
This putative difference between facts and values is widely respected within the scientific and philosophical communities. It not only sets humans apart from nature, it also separates ethics from science, and science from the humanities. But it has always been a topic of philosophical contention.
The distinction between facts and values can be addressed from the perspective of evolutionary biology.
Let us assume, reasonably, that human minded agency and its subjective values evolved out of the objective goals of the biological axiom. One simple answer to a question about the way this occurred is to say that human values arrived with human brains, thus reinforcing the fact-value distinction.
A more thorough answer would point out that both our values and ethical decisions are derived in a complex way that has both minded and mindless ingredients. Both biological and human values are established primarily through behaviour with human mindless (unconscious) behaviour including physiological responses (sweating, digesting) as well as impulses, instincts, intuitions, and other unconscious drivers emanating from the evolutionarily earlier structures of the brain. These sources are, in effect, the objective remnants of our biological agency still exerting an objective (unconscious) influence on our values, including our ethical decisions. However, human conscious values communicated by language include both unconscious and conscious elements that are moderated by our reasoning which occurs in the most recently evolved part of our brain, the frontal cortex.
We respect reason, in part, because it can substantially, but not wholly, override the influences of our mindless and unconscious biological agency.
But when we understand our subjective values from this perspective we see that they are a mixture of our inherited ancient and objective biological values (the mindless and unconscious influences on our behaviour) and the application of reason to our knowledge of these and other factors. What we call our subjective values as established by reason, include an admixture of varying quantities of objective biological value depending on circumstance. Our biology has inseparably entangled both fact and value.
Such a proposal triggers a cognitive dissonance because we both confuse (fail to distinguish between) and conflate (treat as being identical) the universal, objective, and ultimate facts of biological agency, and the uniquely human values of human agency. We fail to realize that it is possible for values to simultaneously express both similarity and difference: the shared features of biological normativity and the unique features of human agency including the use of reason with other advanced cognitive faculties.
We all (but especially intellectuals and ethicists) like to think of morality as demonstrating the supremacy of reason (morality established by pure reason), but our inclination (necessarily locked into our reason) in both politics and ethics, is to fall back on the proximate human values of maximizing happiness, wellbeing, and pleasure as influenced by the ultimate biological value of flourishing.
Biological normativity is not prescriptive in the way that moral language is prescriptive. But the faculty of reason that we proudly and rightly regard as a uniquely distinguishing feature of human agency is still grounded in biological agency and biological normativity. Though reason attempts to transcend, overcome, or be detached from biological normativity, it can only ever be partially successful. Reason itself is, of evolutionary necessity, still ultimately grounded in the biological values that give it purchase. The moral decisions that we think overcome biological normativity simply fall back on second order biological normativity.
We can and do override our biological impulses with our ethical systems (Thou shalt not kill) but the reasons I observe this moral injunction still derived from my biological normativity. Without its foundation in biological normativity, the use of reason in moral decision-making is an incoherent and empty concept.
Since reason can never fully extricate itself from biological normativity, we must face the fact that moral discourse reduces to biological facts, that human proximate and subjective valuing evolved out of ultimate and objective biological facts. The differentiation of facts and values, the descriptive and prescriptive is, at least, exaggerated. Organisms have biological values in human-like way because that is the way they (objectively) are, and that is what led to our own subjective values.
The acceptance of the reality of biological values provides us with a more compelling scientific account of nature since the assimilation of human values to biological values acknowledges the uniquely mindful properties of human values while at the same time recognizing that they evolved out of, and share major characteristics with, their mindless evolutionary antecedents.
Technical language
We humans describe our own form of agency using the minded vocabulary of intentional psychology (needs, wants, desires, beliefs, preferences etc.) This is, in effect, a set of technical terms for the uniquely minded agency manifested by Homo sapiens.
Since the species Homo sapiens has its own agential vocabulary, a thoroughly objective science would develop parallel vocabularies for the unique modes of agency expressed by every other individual species – an impossible task. This is one major reason why we fall back on the use of human-talk as cognitive metaphor - simply because it is the agential language that is most familiar to us.
It is tempting to create a vocabulary of technical terms expressing, on the one hand, biological agency and, on the other, human agency, but this would be speciesism in the extreme.
But there is a further difficulty because, as already pointed out, biological agency and human agency are not mutually exclusive concepts. The proximate and uniquely minded goals of human agency evolved out of, and share characteristics with, the universal, objective, and ultimate mindless goals of biological agency.
Mindedness is not a precondition for agency in living organisms: mindedness is simply one expression of biological agency. We conflate the simple distinction between the minded and the mindless with the complex distinction between biological agency and human agency. It is not that biological agency is a subjective creation of the human mind (cognitive metaphor or heuristic), rather that the proximate and uniquely minded goals of human agency evolved out of, and share characteristics with, the universal, objective, and ultimate mindless goals of biological agency. More simply, the objective behavioural orientation of mindless organisms (mindless purpose) created minds: minds did not create purpose.
There is only one possible scientific solution - an acknowledgement that if current linguistic usage is to reflect nature, then minded concepts like 'agent', 'knowledge', 'reason', 'preference', and 'value', which are currently restricted to discourse about humans, are extended into the realm of mindless agency. This also means that what is currently regarded as metaphor is more aptly treated in literary terms (assuming literary analagies are appropriate here) as simile (see 'metaphor fallacy' below).
Anthropomorphism (human-talk)
We frequently apply to non-human organisms the language that is usually preserved for humans. This is known as anthropomorphism but is referred to here, more simply, as human-talk.
We use human-talk for many reasons including: literary flourish; brevity; our human cognitive bias; and as an educational heuristic - because they make biological explanations simpler and easier to understand.
One special form of human-talk occurs when we use the language of human intentional psychology to describe non-human organisms. This is generally referred to as cognitive metaphor.
Cognitive metaphor
Cognitive metaphor is a clumsy way of acknowledging the mindless, but real, goal-directed behavior (biological agency) that is a defining characteristic of all living organisms. This use of minded language in relation to mindless organisms is one particular kind of anthropomorphism. Scientifically, this is unacceptable because it gifts organisms with cognitive qualities that, in reality, they do not, and cannot, possess.
We humans have emphasized our uniquely human kind of agency by developing a uniquely minded vocabulary (we speak of needs, wants, desires, beliefs, preferences etc.) that expresses conscious intentions, sometimes called the language of intentional psychology. A thoroughly objective science would develop parallel vocabularies to describe the unique agencies of every species – an impossible task.
However, in many cases of so-called cognitive metaphor, the language is clearly intended to convey the biological likeness associated with the grounding characteristics of biological agency, not inferring that the organism has cognitive faculties. In other words, anthropomorphic language interpreted, not literally, but in terms of its intended meaning, describes a relationship between humans and non-humans that is a real likeness based on descent with modification (biological simile grounded in evolution) not cognitive metaphor grounded in a literary device. It expresses a meeting of shared biological agency, not a meeting of minds.
We say that a plant needs water, not because we think that plants experience cognitive states (human agency), but because we intuitively appreciate the significance of survival for all life (biological agency). It is not as if a plant wants water, rather, in terms of the biological agency that plants share with humans they depend on water for their survival. The agency being communicated here is not as if or even like, but the same as our human biological dependency on water. In this sense a plant needs water for exactly the same reasons that humans need water.
We say the purpose of eyes is to see, not because eyes were an intentional creation of God, or that their purpose is a projection of our own intentions, but because, from the perspective of biological agency (the objective behavioural orientation of all organisms) we understand the agential significance of sight for all organisms that have eyes. It is not as if the purpose of eyes is to see but, conversely, given the nature of biological agency, eyes have obvious and objective agential significance.
We say a spider knows how to build its web, not because we believe that spiders are consciously aware of the principles of web construction, but because we are amazed at how, without our cognitive powers, spiders instinctively build something as intricate and purposeful as a web, using information that is passed mechanically, and with meticulous precision, from one generation to the next in their genes. Even though the capacity for web building is an adaptive trait encoded in genes, rather than a cognitive attribute, it is a manifestation of biological agency that is so sophisticated that we rightly associate it with our own agency. It is not as if a spider knows how to build a web, rather, that web building (biological agency) is extraordinarily like (and biologically related to) our human cognitive capacity to learn, remember, and apply accumulated knowledge (human agency).
Minds, bodies, & behavior
The internal processes of organisms are of biological significance only in so far as they influence behaviour: it is behaviour that confronts the testing arena of the environment.
From a human perspective this is not immediately obvious because our human conscious intentions are vivid and, even though these intentions are private, we see obvious causal connections between our intentions and outcomes in the world. There is, however, an existential directness about behaviour. We are not committed to jail for what we think, but for what we do (how we behave): it is actions and deeds (agency, behaviour) that speak louder than words. Words and ideas can indeed change the world, but only through the medium of behaviour.
A subtle shift in semantic focus takes place when talk moves from mental states to bodily behaviour, from brains with intentions to bodies with goals. First, it draws attention to the fact that human agency as expressed by human bodies engages not only our conscious intentions, but also factors determined by bodily and unconscious needs. Second, the emphasis on behaviour draws attention away from uniquely minded human agency and towards the universal goal-directed activity of all organisms as a life-defining characteristic, and an objective fact.
If we want to understand the biological significance of human agency then we must look to human behaviour and in so doing we must also look to those aspects of human behaviour that, as a consequence of evolution, are held in common with other organisms – the mutual connections that exist between human agency and biological agency.
The denial of biological agency, purpose, and values
Scour biological textbooks, or the web, and you will find little, if anything, about biological agency, biological values, or the purpose that pervades everything in nature.
This downplaying of biological agency probably dates from a time before evolutionary theory, when each species was considered a unique and special creation of God with humans being special ‘ensouled’ beings distinct from all the other creatures that had been placed on earth for human benefit.
The denial of real biological agency, purpose, and value rests on several interrelated confusions concerning the distinction between, on the one hand, organisms with minds and those without minds and, on the other, biological agency and human agency.
First, an inversion of reasoning.
In biology it is the agential behaviour of autonomous bodies that most directly determines outcomes, regardless of the internal processes that influence this behaviour. So, for example, human agency is most potently expressed by actions, not thoughts and words. Words and ideas can indeed change the world, but only through the medium of behaviour.
Because the purposes and values inherent in biological agency can only be understood by (represented in) human minds, it is often assumed that they can only exist in human minds – that they are therefore a creation of human minds. From this error of reasoning, it follows that only humans can be agents with goals, purposes, and values: that non-human organisms are, at best, only agent-like. Whereas, in fact, rather than biological goals being an invention of human minds, they are the biological substrate out of which the goals of human agency evolved.
Certainly, only minded humans can understand why animals have eyes, fish have fins, and cacti have spines; but this does not mean that these reasons and purposes do not exist outside human minds. Of course, the purpose of a prosthetic leg is established by the intentions of its inventor, but legs that occur in nature likewise have purposes, even though they were created by a natural process with no conscious intentions. We mistakenly conflate a lack of conscious intention with a lack of agency. Simply because non-human organisms lack self-awareness, does not mean that they also lack agency – that agency is mind-dependent.
Biological goals can only be understood (represented by) human minds, but that does not mean that they only exist in human minds – that they are a creation of human minds. The goals of non-human organisms are not spoken or thought; they are demonstrated in their behaviour, and they existed (were real) in nature long before they made possible the evolution of human brains, minds, and language.
Second, converse reasoning.
The pre-Darwinian mental representation of the world as a Great Chain of being (Ladder of Life) placed humans in an exalted position just below God.
Darwin replaced the image of the ladder with that of a tree whose branches were constrained by what had gone before. Humans were just one of the many evolutionary outcomes of the interaction between autonomous organisms and their ancestral environments.
Agency in nature has, likewise, taken on as many different forms as there are species, each species expressing its agency in its own way as constrained by its physical form. We marvel at the internal processing agency of the human intellect while ignoring, say, the mental miracle of a bat catching a fly using echolocation inside a cave teeming with other bats.
At present our inherited pre-Darwinian intellectual tradition treats human agency as the only real agency with biological agency its unreal (as if) creation – the reading of human agency into non-human mindless organisms.
Scientifically the converse applies. Human agency has its origin in the biological agency that made human subjectivity possible. Human agency (for all its conscious, deliberative, and abstractive brilliance) is just one of many forms of biological agency and must be scientifically explained in terms of the evolutionary context out of which it arose.
Biological agency is not a fiction invented by the human consciously agential mind. The converse applies. Human agency is just one highly evolved example of the many kinds of biological agency that made human subjectivity possible.
Third, the metaphor fallacy.
The treatment of minded humanizing language as cognitive metaphor.[42] This fallacy interprets the relationship between biological agency and human agency using the logic of a literary device, the metaphor, in which one of the relata is always figurative (unreal). This forces the real evolutionary likeness between biological agency and human agency to be treated as an 'as if' (unreal) likeness, rather than a similarity resulting from real evolutionary connection. Were a literary device the appropriate mechanism for making this comparison then, in strict literary terms, the likeness is not metaphor but simile.
Fourth, the the agency error.
In science and philosophy, it is conventional for the anthropomorphic language of human intentional psychology (wants, needs, knows, deceives etc.), as applied to non-human organisms, to be treated as cognitive metaphor since it erroneously implies that mindless organisms possess cognitive faculties. By extension we then assume that non-human organisms therefore have no purpose and no agency.
There is a major flaw in this conventional account of cognitive metaphor. Subsuming all agency under human agency deprives mindless organisms of any form of agency. It refuses to acknowledge both the real and universal character of biological agency that unites the community of life, and its behavioral expression through evolutionarily graded forms.
Under closer inspection it is evident that, in general, such language is not referencing a figurative likeness based on human intentions (metaphor) but a real likeness (simile) that is grounded in universal biological agency, the goals of the biological axiom. For example, we say that a plant ‘wants’ water, not because we believe that plants have human-like desires, but because we acknowledge the universal disposition of all living organisms to survive, reproduce, and flourish.
We confuse the distinction that exists between the universal biological agency shared by all organisms and the minded form of this agency that is uniquely human. Much of the intentional language of human-talk applied to mindless organisms references universal biological, not uniquely human, agency.
This is the traditional and mistaken assumption that the agency we imply when using anthropomorphic language is the unique agency of humans when, in fact, its intended meaning relates to the universal biological agency that is present in all living organisms.
When we say that a plant ‘wants’ or ‘needs’ water we are not suggesting that plants experience intentional mental states, but that they share with us the universal biological agential disposition to survive, reproduce, and flourish. This is a form of biological empathy - but not a communion of minds, more a recognition of shared and mindless biological values.
Biological agency is not a metaphorical creation of human agency: human agency is a real evolutionary development of biological agency.
Fifth, biological empathy.
In spite of attempts to rid biology of purpose, agency, cognitive metaphor and other forms of the teleological idiom, we continue to use these forms of language because we fail to recognize that in doing so we are acknowledging the universal goals of biological agency, not the uniquely intentional goals of human agency.
For this reason - which amounts to a human empathy with biological agency - biology will never rid itself of teleology because this is a teleology that is grounded in the reality of evolutionary connection.
Sixth Precedence of behaviour over minds
Agency is expressed by the behavior of the bodies of autonomous agents. It is behavior as action (regardless of the internal process generating that behaviour) that most directly determines biological outcomes. Conscious intentions are uniquely human, but behaviour grounded in the biological axiom is expressed by all organisms and it takes explanatory precedence over internal causation. Human behaviour, as influenced by conscious intentions, evolved out of mindless biological goals and is just one form of biological agency.
Seventh, Anthropocentric agential language
As uniquely minded organisms we humans we have devised the language of intentional psychology to describe our species-specific minded agency. Since there are no equivalent vocabularies for other species it is unsurprising that we use our own minded Homo sapiens terms to describe the agency of other organisms.
Anthropomorphic analogical language is, in general, not trying to convey the as if language of cognitive metaphor, but the real likeness of biological simile (the result of evolutionary connection).
From an evolutionary perspective human agency evolved out of (is a subset of) biological agency and thus the proximate minded and therefore (often) subjective goals of human agency, are subordinate to the ultimate objective goals of biological agency.
In sum, we have yet to scientifically accept that biological agency is not a metaphorical creation of human agency: human agency is a real evolutionary development of biological agency.
Historically, this philosophical confusion has been perpetuated by a pre-Darwinian anthropocentrism that understood life as Special Creation, rather than evolution with modification from a common ancestor.
If we regard anthropomorphism as cognitive metaphor or heuristic, then we not only devalue, but deny, the real evolutionarily graded agential reality of the organisms, structures, processes, and behaviours that unite the community of life.
If biological agency, goals, purposes, and values are real then their investigation can be transferred out of the realm of philosophical speculation and into the domain of scientific explanation.
Forms of biological agency
For humans, autonomy entails a conscious distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’. Our minds provide a sense of self as they segregate the world into objects of experience, focus on a limited range of these, group them according to similarities and differences, and prioritize them according to purpose, interest, or preparation for action. For simplicity we can refer to this complex agential process as mental adaptation, which is a form of human agency.
This minded human agency evolved out of the capacity of mindless organisms (as revealed by their behaviour) to discriminate between objects of their environment and to prioritize these in relation to themselves and their behaviour. That mindless adaptation is a demonstration of both autonomy and agency. And it is clearly out of this mindless process of adaptation that minded adaptation evolved.
Biological agency is manifest through agential behaviour as expressed by each biological body. This behaviour is relatively uniform within a species due to their similarity of physical form. The agency of a plant is expressed in very different ways from from that of a fish. However, since all organisms arose from a common ancestor the agential similarities between organisms is always a matter of degree.
When considering agency as it relates to minds, five kinds can be distinguished each building on the former:
mindless inorganic 'agency' - the ordering 'behaviour' of inanimate matter
mindless biological agency - agential (goal-directed) behaviour that is not mind-directed (also found in minded organisms e.g. unconscious sweating)
unconscious minded agency - the unconscious, intuitive or instinctive behaviour of minded creatures e.g. fear of snakes
conscious minded agency - as behaviour that is a consequence of conscious deliberation
collective or cultural agency - behaviour that is a product of collective learning usually communicated through symbolic language as socio-cultural norms
First published on the internet – 1 March 2019
. . . 5 August 2023 – minor editing
Bust of Aristotle. Marble Roman copy of original Greek bronze by Lysippos in 330 BCE
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Charles Darwin c. 1854 aged 45
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
