Plant agency
Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) – showing trigger hairs
Carnivorous plants exemplify biological agency in a form that is strikingly evident yet non-cognitive: goal-directed behavior without conscious intention. From the standpoint of the APS (Agency–Process–Scale) framework, such behaviors are not anomalies but clear expressions of the biological imperative—an evolved, embodied orientation toward persistence, proliferation, functional responsiveness, and open-ended evolution. This imperative defines life as the capacity for adaptive self-production and interaction across multiple scales of biological organization.
In this view, carnivorous plants are autonomous agentive systems whose coordinated behaviors arise from the dynamic interplay of structure, function, and environment. Their traps do not think, but they are functionally organized to achieve specific ends: the capture and digestion of prey to supplement nutrients otherwise unavailable in their ecological niche. This capacity reflects their status as agentive processual systems, shaped by and responsive to evolutionary and ecological constraints.
Rather than relying on consciousness or mental representation, plant agency operates through evolved structures and distributed processes that enact the biological imperative under real-world conditions. Their behavior is not random but organized around maintaining internal viability and participating in functional and evolutionary relationships with their surroundings. It is from this universal form of biological agency—grounded in process and scale—that more complex cognitive forms, including human subjectivity and intention, have emerged over evolutionary time.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
NoahElhardt – Accessed 26 April 2018
Quick Take
The article explains plant agency through the lens of the Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework, positioning plants as active biological agents despite lacking brains or nervous systems. Agency here is defined as the in-principle capacity of living systems to survive, reproduce, adapt, and evolve translated operationally into the capacity to perceive the environment, and pursue goal‑oriented behavior that promotes persistence, adaptation, and reproduction—what the site terms the biological imperative.
Carnivorous plants such as the Venus flytrap are discussed as vivid examples. Their trap-closing behavior isn’t conscious but is functionally targeted: coordinated to capture prey and supplement nutrient supply within their ecological niche This behavior isn’t random; it’s informed by evolved structures and processes shaped by ecological constraints and objectives.
The article rigorously distinguishes biological agency from conscious intention. It asserts that agency is not psychological but arises from organized processes that support an organism’s viability. Bacteria moving toward nutrients and fungi repairing themselves are examples: not purposeful in the human sense, yet purpose-driven in biological terms.
Within the APS framework:
- Agency refers to adaptive, goal-directed action seen across the living world.
- Process emphasizes life as continual self-regulating activity (autopoiesis).
- Scale underlines that agency and cognition operate across multiple nested levels—from cellular to organismal to ecological—highlighting the multilevel integration required for plant agency.
The article explores how human agency and cognition evolved from this broader form of biological agency, not separately invented by humans. Human faculties like foresight or abstract thought are thus viewed as highly evolved derivatives of fundamental biological agency expressed in all life forms.
By reframing plants within APS, the article challenges the default assumption that agency and cognition require neural infrastructures. Instead, it argues that even non-neural systems accomplish agentive behavior through distributed signaling, structural responsiveness, and internal regulation—all without consciousness or mental representation.
In sum, the Plant Agency article presents plants as authentic agents: organisms whose adaptive, context-sensitive behavior qualifies as biological agency. The APS framework supports this interpretation by grounding plant behavior in evolved, processual, and multiscale dynamics—dissolving the false dichotomy between cognitive and non-cognitive life.
Plant agency, under APS, is not a conceptual stretch but a scientifically consistent recognition that all living beings—plants included—are purposeful systems organized around survival and adaptation. Even without brains, plants engage in self-regulating behaviors that fulfill real biological goals: persistence, reproduction, and environmental interaction.
Introduction
Biological Agency Beyond the Human
Plant agency is just one form of more general biological agency. Biological agency is not about conscious decisions or moral responsibility. Instead, it refers to a system’s ability to regulate itself, respond meaningfully to its environment, and act in ways that are functional for its survival and continued existence. This kind of agency is evident in all organisms—even those without nervous systems. Bacteria move toward nutrients and away from toxins. Fungi explore their surroundings and repair themselves. These aren’t deliberate choices, but they are purposeful in a biological sense: they help the organism persist.
Plants are often left out of this picture, partly because they don’t move in ways we immediately notice, and they don’t have brains or behaviors that look familiar to us. But the APS framework shows why this view is too narrow.
The biological imperative
Within the Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework, (Spencer, 2025), the biological imperative refers to the intrinsic tendency of living systems to sustain and regenerate their own organized existence. This imperative is not simply a metaphor or heuristic device but a foundational and scientifically defensible principle that underlies the persistence, organization, and evolutionary continuity of life. It is expressed in the capacity of organisms to maintain themselves through internal regulation, interaction with their environment, and coordinated activity across multiple scales of biological organization.
The significance of the biological imperative lies in its potential to provide a robust scientific definition of life—one that does not rely on arbitrary checklists of traits or externally imposed purposes, but instead offers an internal, processual explanation of why living systems behave as they do. It accounts for the emergence of biological functions through agentive dynamics aimed at maintaining viability, not as expressions of external teleology, but as intrinsic consequences of organizational closure and self-production. In doing so, the APS framework offers a unifying account of evolution, development, and cognition grounded in the logic of biological agency.
Organisms as agents: the context of biological agency
Biological agency is most fully expressed at the level of the organism, where the capacity for goal-directed behavior, self-maintenance, and adaptive interaction with the environment is most integratively manifest.
While the Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework offers a general context for understanding agency across all levels of life, the organism stands at the nexus of these dimensions—acting as a coherent, self-organizing system that embodies the fundamental characteristics of life.
This agency is clarified and extended through the core processes of persistence, inheritance, and transformation:
Persistence reflects the organism’s active maintenance of its identity and function in the face of change.
Inheritance ensures continuity across generations through the transmission of functional organization.
Transformation enables novelty and adaptation through development and evolution.
Within this expanded view, biological agency becomes more precisely structured by distinguishing:
The agent (typically the organism),
The mission (realized as cognition: the capacity to assess, respond, and coordinate toward survival and flourishing), and
The means (expressed in behavior: the organism’s active interface with its environment).
Together, this framework offers a multilevel, dynamic, and integrated account of what it means for life to act, adapt, and evolve.
Goals & goal-directedness
Life is often recognized by its goal-directedness—its capacity to behave in ways that are not random but oriented toward specific ends. These include proximate goals, such as seeking water or light, and ultimate goals, like survival, reproduction, adaptation, and evolutionary continuity. These ultimate goals may be considered:
Objective, because they are observable empirical features of living systems;
Universal, because they are expressed by all organisms, regardless of complexity;
Ultimate, because they integrate and subsume all lower-order (proximate) functions—when they fail, life ends.
How the APS reframes this:
The APS framework retains these insights but provides a more integrated and scientifically grounded account by focusing on three interrelated dimensions:
Agency: rather than merely attributing “goal-directedness” as a surface description, APS defines life as the embodiment of biological agency—the intrinsic capacity of a system to generate and coordinate behavior in order to persist. Agency is not assumed to be conscious or intentional but is a system-level, emergent property grounded in functional organization.
Process: life is not a static thing with goals but a dynamic set of interacting processes. What appears as a “goal” is better understood as a stabilizing tendency within a system of continuous self-production (autopoiesis), regulation, and interaction with the environment. These tendencies are evolutionary in origin and are continually enacted in real time by living systems.
Scale: proximate and ultimate goals are seen as different scales of causation within the system. APS emphasizes that multiscale coordination—from molecular to behavioral to evolutionary scales—is required to maintain agency. “Ultimate goals” are not separate causal forces but generalized patterns of persistence that emerge from the integration of processes across time and scale.
APS reframes life not as a thing with goals but as an agentive, multiscale process system where what we call “goals” are patterns of functional persistence and coordination. The so-called “biological imperative”—to survive, reproduce, adapt, and evolve—is not an abstract rule imposed from outside, but an emergent pattern intrinsic to the organization of life itself. This reframing avoids anthropocentric interpretations while providing a rigorous, naturalized account of life’s defining properties.
The biological axiom refers to the universal observation that all living systems exhibit behaviors consistent with survival, reproduction, adaptation, and evolution. It is descriptive, empirical, and observational—a summary of what life in fact does.
The biological imperative, by contrast, reframes this axiom in functional and processual terms: it is the necessary and sufficient condition for life—agency directed toward maintaining identity (persistence), enabling continuity (inheritance), and supporting change (transformation). It is more explanatory and mechanistic—what life must do to continue being alive.
What Is Plant Agency?
When we talk about agency, we often think of people making choices, acting with intention, or pursuing goals. This kind of human agency is complex and self-aware—it involves language, reflection, and culture. But human agency is just one expression of a much broader phenomenon. All living things, from bacteria to trees, exhibit biological agency: the capacity to act in ways that preserve their existence, maintain internal organization, and adapt to their environments.
This is where the APS framework—Agency, Process, and Scale—offers a powerful tool for rethinking life. Rather than viewing organisms as passive machines assembled from parts, APS understands life as a dynamic coordination of processes unfolding across multiple levels of organization and time. From this perspective, agency is not exclusive to minds or animals—it is a defining feature of life itself. Every living system, at every scale, is engaged in self-generating and self-sustaining activity. Agency is not something added to life—it is life.
Within this framework, plant agency is a striking example of how different organisms express the same biological imperative through unique structures, processes, and behaviors (SPBs). Like all biological agents, plants are autonomous systems whose activity is unified by the objective, universal, and ultimate tendency to survive, reproduce, and flourish. This goal-directed behavior is not conscious but nevertheless adaptive, effective, and evolutionarily shaped.
To understand plant agency, then, is to explore how plants—without nervous systems or overt movement—enact the same deep logic of life found in all organisms. This article approaches the topic from an evolutionary and comparative perspective, focusing on the distinctive features that set plant agency apart from that of animals or microbes. In doing so, it highlights how agency is not only a property of animals with minds, but a fundamental organizing principle of life—even in the quiet, rooted lives of plants.
What Makes Plant Agency Unique?
Plant Agency
Plant agency, like all biological agency, is expressed through the structures, processes, and behaviors of autonomous organisms whose activity is unified in the objective, universal, and ultimate behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish. This goal-directed behavior is most effectively understood and explained from an evolutionary perspective—as a study of comparative agency—focusing on the distinctive ways in which different organisms express their biological imperatives. In the case of plants, this involves a form of agency shaped by rootedness, modularity, and continuous development.
Plants are not passive. They are highly capable biological agents that respond to their environment through growth and structural reconfiguration rather than movement. This is not a lesser form of behavior but an equally effective and evolutionarily successful strategy. Like all organisms, plants share the ultimate goals of the biological imperative, but they realize these goals through unique structures, processes, and behaviors.
The question to be addressed here is how plant agency differs from that of other organisms. While many agential characteristics are shared across life—such as goal-directedness and environmental responsiveness—the mode of expression in plants is highly distinctive.
Some key features that characterize plant agency include:
Rooted agency: Because plants cannot relocate, they must respond to their immediate surroundings with great sensitivity. They constantly monitor environmental variables such as light, gravity, moisture, and nutrient availability, adjusting their growth and development accordingly. This results in finely tuned, context-sensitive decision-making.
Developmental plasticity: Plants exhibit remarkable flexibility in how they grow and adapt over time. They can modify their architecture, redirect growth, and regenerate damaged parts. Their agency is expressed not in rapid motion but in sustained, adaptive development.
Distributed coordination: Lacking a central brain, plants use decentralized systems of perception and signaling. Roots, shoots, and leaves all act semi-independently, perceiving and responding to their local conditions, yet in coordinated ways across the organism.
Functional integration across scales: Plant agency emerges from coordinated processes at the molecular, cellular, tissue, and whole-organism levels. For instance, a chemical signal from a damaged leaf can trigger systemic defenses in other parts of the plant, demonstrating complex internal communication.
Environmental construction: Far from merely adapting to their environments, plants actively shape them. They do this through root exudates, canopy architecture, symbiotic relationships (e.g., with fungi and pollinators), and more. This niche construction plays a direct role in securing their survival and flourishing.
The physical features that enable this distinctive mode of agency include:
Photosynthetic or autotrophic metabolism, enabling plants to generate their own food using chlorophyll, sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide.
Rigid cellulose cell walls that provide mechanical support and protection.
Relative immobility, with growth rather than locomotion as the primary mode of environmental engagement.
A life cycle characterized by Alternation of Generations, transitioning between haploid (gametophyte) and diploid (sporophyte) phases.
Diverse reproductive strategies, including both sexual reproduction via flowers and asexual propagation (e.g., vegetative growth).
Specialized structures such as roots, stems, and leaves that support adaptation to terrestrial environments.
Symbiotic relationships, such as mutualistic mycorrhizal associations with fungi, that enhance nutrient uptake and ecological integration.
Taken together, these features define a coherent and evolutionarily robust form of biological agency—one that is distinctively plant-like but fully consistent with the broader framework of autonomous, goal-directed life.
Why It Matters
Understanding plant agency challenges our assumptions about intelligence, behavior, and the meaning of life. It shows that agency does not require a brain—only the capacity to sustain oneself through functional, self-organizing processes in interaction with the world.
By recognizing the unique kind of agency plants embody, we not only deepen our understanding of the plant kingdom, but we also shift our view of life itself—from a hierarchy dominated by animals and humans to a rich tapestry of dynamic, self-maintaining systems, each with its own way of being in the world.
The language of agency
1. Psychologizing and Biologizing Language
Definitions and Examples
Psychologizing Language
Psychologizing language refers to the use of mentalistic or mind-based terms (like “wants,” “decides,” “feels,” “thinks”) to describe behavior or processes, especially in non-human or non-mental contexts.
Examples:
“The plant wants to reach the sunlight.”
“The bacteria decided to move toward the sugar.”
“The gene knows when to turn on.”
While these expressions are often metaphorical or shorthand, they can obscure mechanistic understanding if taken literally. However, they may also capture important features of goal-directed or adaptive behavior, which is why such language persists, especially in popular science and informal discussions.
Biologizing Language
Biologizing language refers to using biological or evolutionary terms to explain behaviors, traits, or phenomena, especially when applied to humans or cultural contexts. It emphasizes biological mechanisms like survival, reproduction, selection, or adaptation.
Examples:
“People form social groups because it enhances evolutionary fitness.”
“Parental care is adaptive because it increases offspring survival.”
“Plants have strategies for coping with drought.”
Biologizing language can highlight continuity between life forms and bring human phenomena into a biological framework. However, it can also lead to reductionism if social, historical, or symbolic factors are ignored.
2. The APS Framework and the Rehabilitation of Agency in Biology
The APS framework reframes biological theory by recognizing that agency is not exclusive to conscious beings like humans but is a fundamental feature of living systems.
A Shift in Scientific Thinking
Traditionally, biology was cautious about using words like agency, purpose, or cognition—especially in plants, microbes, or cells—because they were seen as overly anthropomorphic or mentalistic.
But now, science is beginning to accept that:
Agency (the capacity to initiate and coordinate behavior toward a goal) is not uniquely human.
Purpose (teleology) can be understood as naturalized—i.e., emerging from biological organization, not divine or mental design.
Cognition is not restricted to brains but refers to adaptive information processing at many levels of life (cells, tissues, organisms, ecosystems).
Simple Examples:
A vine actively grows toward a support structure. This is not because it “wants” to—but because it is an agentive process that involves sensing, responding, and integrating environmental information.
A white blood cell pursues a bacterium. This pursuit involves goal-directed behavior, coordination, and feedback—not conscious intent, but still agentive.
A plant remembers past drought and alters its water use. This “memory” is not psychological but embodied and functional, and reflects cognitive-like capacities.
3. How APS Clarifies This Language
Agency (A)
The APS framework defines biological systems as agential: they are not passive machines but entities that generate, regulate, and pursue biological goals.
This supports the use of terms like acts, regulates, initiates, responds, without implying consciousness.
Example: A cell monitors and adjusts its internal state—a minimal form of agency.
Process (P)
Life is processual, not static. Function emerges from ongoing activity rather than fixed structures.
What appears as “purpose” can be understood as the dynamic coordination of processes that support survival and reproduction.
Scale (S)
Agency, cognition, and goal-directedness are scale-dependent. They operate at molecular, cellular, organismal, and ecological levels—not just in brains.
This helps justify why plant behavior, or bacterial sensing, or immune responses can be discussed in terms of cognition or agency without anthropomorphism.
Toward a Naturalized Vocabulary of Life
Using words like agency, purpose, and cognition is no longer just metaphorical or anthropomorphic when grounded in the APS framework. Instead, they reflect the real capacities of living systems to act, adapt, and evolve in contextually appropriate ways. The APS approach helps biology:
Avoid outdated dualisms (e.g., mind vs. matter),
Treat agency as natural, material, and emergent, and
Provide a more coherent language to describe life from cells to ecosystems.
In short, the APS framework legitimizes a new, scientifically rigorous language of biological agency—replacing metaphors with models and unifying the study of life across all scales.
Kinds of Agency in Biology
1. Agency as a Universal but Varied Biological Phenomenon
While all organisms share the same ultimate goals—survival, reproduction, adaptation, and evolution (the biological imperative)—these goals are expressed through the diverse structures, processes, and behaviors (spb) that characterize each kind of organism. From amoebae to dandelions, herrings to humans, agency manifests through myriad evolutionary configurations, each adapted to its context.
Though these manifestations differ dramatically, the underlying principles of biological agency are universal. The biological imperative is always pursued, but expressed by degree—more complexly in some lineages than others. This gradation in expression forms the basis for distinguishing kinds of agency.
2. From Mindless Origins to Human Agency
Agential, purposive, and normative features of life long predate humans. These features—often assumed to require consciousness—originated in mindless, pre-conscious biological systems. Concepts like ‘purpose’, ‘value’, and ‘agency’ have evolutionary precursors that emerged independently of minds, as functional expressions of the biological imperative.
Human agency represents an advanced and self-reflective form. With memory, foresight, learning, communication, and self-awareness, we exemplify a uniquely rich agential repertoire. But these traits evolved from simpler forms. What is often overlooked is the continuity: organisms without minds still exhibit key agential features—such as goal-directed behavior, adaptive responsiveness, rudimentary memory and anticipation, and even proto-reasoning—expressed in non-conscious, functional terms.
Graded Kinds of Biological Agency
Biological agency is best understood as a graded, context-sensitive capacity, not a fixed essence. It includes:
Proto-agency: Minimal, self-maintaining systems that regulate themselves (e.g., autocatalytic networks).
Functional agency: Systems capable of goal-directed physiological responses (e.g., metabolism, phototropism).
Developmental agency: Coordinated morphogenesis and plastic developmental responses (e.g., in plants or embryos).
Evolutionary agency: Systems that not only adapt in the short term but also modify heritable traits across generations.
These forms of agency are not mutually exclusive but layered and often co-present within organisms, each contributing to the functional coherence and evolutionary resilience of life.
4. Multiscale and Transient Forms of Agency
Agency is not always confined to well-bounded individuals. Transient or embedded forms—such as immune responses, microbial collectives, or cellular ensembles—may not be evolutionarily individuated, but still display context-sensitive agential properties. This includes:
Transient agency: Temporary but adaptive responses (e.g., stress responses, signal cascades).
Distributed agency: Collectively emergent in systems like holobionts, ecosystems, or neural networks.
These forms highlight the multiscale nature of agency, where proximal mechanisms (metabolism, homeostasis, perception) support ultimate outcomes like evolutionary success—not through foresight or design, but via organizational closure, where networks of constraints sustain and regenerate the system (Moreno & Mossio, 2015).
5. A Coherent Definition in a Processual Framework
Agency in biology can be coherently defined without reducing it to human psychology or diluting its meaning. Within the APS (Agency–Process–Scale) framework, agency is:
An emergent, context-sensitive capacity rooted in organizational closure, constraint dynamics, and functional coherence across biological scales.
This processual, graded view enables distinctions between different kinds of agency while preserving a unifying logic. It clarifies how life can be both mindless and purposive, both simple and sophisticated—without contradiction.
Characteristics of Plant Agency
Plant agency can be scientifically characterized as a distributed, evolutionarily shaped system of non-conscious yet purposive responsiveness. This includes sensory integration, growth-based motility, adaptive plasticity, non-neural memory, and anticipatory regulation. Though lacking a brain or mind, plants express a pre-conscious biological intelligence—a functional agency grounded in natural teleology, environmental coupling, and evolutionary design. Understanding plant agency within this taxonomy helps bridge the gap between mechanistic biology and the complex, goal-directed behavior exhibited by all living systems.
1. Sensory and Signaling Systems
Plants perceive their environments through distributed networks rather than centralized nervous systems. They detect light, gravity, moisture, chemicals, touch, and more using membrane-bound receptors, mechanosensory proteins, and hormone fluxes. Responses are coordinated through electrical signals (e.g. action potentials), phytohormones (e.g. auxin, jasmonic acid), and secondary metabolites, forming an integrated communication system that mediates growth and defense.
2. Motility and Morphodynamic Response
Though rooted in place, plants adjust their form and behavior across time and space. Movements like phototropism, thigmotropism, and circumnutation allow plants to seek light, support, or resources. These developmental motions, when viewed across time-lapse, reflect an active and responsive agency. Climbing, closing traps, or orienting leaves are examples of how plants ‘move’ to optimize fitness.
3. Adaptation and Evolutionary Teleology
Plants exhibit a vast repertoire of evolutionary innovations that resemble strategic behavior—e.g., mimicking insect mates to ensure pollination, deploying chemical defenses, or engineering seed dispersal. These are not consciously designed but result from natural selection acting on variations that improve function. Teleology here refers not to conscious intention but to evolved functionality directed toward persistence, reproduction, and flourishing—what Aristotle called natural ends.
4. Memory, Anticipation, and Information Processing
Plants retain and use environmental information through mechanisms such as epigenetic modification, stress imprinting, and signal integration over time (e.g., the Venus flytrap’s trigger memory). Anticipatory behaviors (like pre-flowering under photoperiod cues) emerge from internal regulatory networks that adjust based on past conditions. Memory is non-neural but biologically real—encoded in molecular structures and developmental pathways.
5. Awareness, Cognition, and Pre-conscious Agency
Plants are not conscious in the human or animal sense, but they demonstrate forms of non-conscious awareness—systematic responsiveness to internal and external conditions that support autonomous functioning. Their agency emerges from evolutionary history, embodied structure, and environmental coupling. This allows plants to make biologically meaningful distinctions and act on them, fulfilling the biological imperative without the need for subjective awareness.
Plant Cognition within the APS Framework
The idea that plants may exhibit cognition—and perhaps rudimentary forms of awareness, anticipation, and memory—challenges conventional boundaries between mindless and mindful organisms. Yet this proposition is not as radical as it first appears when considered within the Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework (Spencer, 2025), which situates cognition as a process emerging from biological agency across evolutionary scales, rather than as a property exclusive to brains.
In animal studies, we already accept that consciousness exists by degree: that a dog is not conscious in the same way as a human, and a worm not in the same way as a dog. This spectrum of consciousness, grounded in evolutionary continuity, allows us to speak meaningfully of diverse forms of awareness even when we lack introspective access to their content. What we call consciousness—be it human, animal, or minimal—is not an all-or-nothing property but part of a graded, natural continuum of goal-directed, environmentally responsive function.
Applying this same evolutionary logic to plants is scientifically consistent. Plants do not have brains, but brains are not the sole seat of all cognitive-like processes. If cognition is reframed not as abstract reasoning or language but as adaptive environmental responsiveness involving sensing, signaling, memory, and anticipation, then many plant capacities—phototropism, kin recognition, stress priming, root navigation, and systemic signaling—qualify as forms of biological cognition. These are not metaphorical analogies but functionally real information-processing capabilities evolved to solve problems in specific ecological contexts.
Much of the resistance to the idea of plant cognition stems from a human-centric (top-down) conception of mind. Because we associate cognition with conscious introspection, we assume that entities lacking this must also lack cognition. But as the APS framework emphasizes, agency is a property of process, not structure—and cognition, understood as the functional coordination of behavior in response to internal and external states, emerges across living systems as a scale-dependent phenomenon. Plants, though lacking neurons, show clear evidence of anticipatory behavior, signal integration, and environmentally modulated plasticity that align with this functional definition.
The evolutionary emergence of reason, language, and abstract thought in humans is not an argument against plant cognition—it is an extension of the same adaptive logic. Human cognitive abilities, as Dennett (2017) notes, “bubbled up from the bottom” through non-conscious but purposive processes of natural selection. Natural teleology—the appearance of ‘reasons’, ‘functions’, and ‘design’ in biology—is not anthropomorphic projection but a real feature of evolved living systems. Plants, like all organisms, are products of this purposive continuity.
For example, memory, often seen as requiring a brain, can be understood as the capacity to encode, store, and retrieve information. While only some forms of memory—like episodic or semantic memory—require conscious access, others (e.g., immune memory, procedural memory) do not. Plants exhibit robust forms of stress memory, developmental priming, and even inherited responses to stimuli that satisfy the core criteria of biological memory, despite lacking neurons.
Similarly, anticipation, often considered a hallmark of conscious agency, appears in plants as predictive adjustments to seasonal change, competition, and damage. These anticipatory responses rely on temporally extended physiological adjustments—functionally comparable to learning—even if they lack subjective experience.
The APS framework clarifies this by decoupling cognition from consciousness: cognition is not defined by sentience but by functionally integrated agency. Plants are not conscious in the way that humans are, but their capacity for sensorimotor coordination, learning-like responses, and adaptive behavior makes them legitimate subjects of cognitive science—so long as cognition is defined in biologically grounded, non-anthropocentric terms.
In short, plant cognition is not a poetic metaphor, but a scientifically realistic extension of functional biology into the domain of intelligent behavior without brains. This recognition brings our scientific language into closer alignment with biological reality, acknowledging that cognition, like life itself, emerges through evolutionary processes wherever functionally adaptive behavior is required for survival and reproduction.
Plants as Intellectual Competitors: How Evolution Outsmarts Us
There are at least two profound ways in which plants have pre-consciously ‘outwitted’ human beings—achievements that should make us pause in admiration, if not envy.
First, and most astonishingly, plants solved the fundamental energy problem of life. They manufacture their own food using sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, without needing to move a muscle. Photosynthesis—the quiet miracle of converting light into biochemical energy—is nothing less than evolutionary alchemy. This process sustains not just the plant, but the entire biosphere. Every mouthful of food you’ve ever eaten, every breath you’ve taken, ultimately traces back to a plant capturing sunlight.
This is a feat of evolutionary ‘engineering’ so profound that it rivals, and arguably exceeds, the complexity of the human brain. Consider this: humans evolved elaborate nervous systems, sensorimotor coordination, muscles, bones, and vast energetic expenditure just to move toward food—yet plants made food come to them. They cracked the energy code without consciousness, language, or technology. We evolved brains because we couldn’t photosynthesize.
Second, plants may have ‘domesticated us’ as much as we them. The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, often described as humanity’s great leap forward, was in fact a coevolutionary pact with a handful of grasses—cereal crops like wheat, barley, and rice. These plants spread their genes across the globe by enticing humans to settle, sow, tend, and worship them. In the process, we transformed ourselves: from mobile foragers to sedentary agriculturalists, from scattered tribes to urban civilizations. Our cities were built on the promise of plant productivity.
Far from being passive scenery or inert resources, plants are dynamic architects of ecosystems and evolution. Their forms reveal astonishing pre-conscious intelligence: leaves that track the sun, roots that ‘decide’ where to grow, seeds that time their germination to seasonal rhythms, and symbiotic relationships with fungi, bacteria, and animals that rival the most complex human alliances. The acacia tree summons ant bodyguards when under attack. The dodder vine ‘smells’ its host before latching on. Orchids deceive pollinators with exquisite mimicry. Strangler figs engineer their own lattice-like host scaffold. Plants have evolved hydraulic systems more efficient than our plumbing, chemical defenses more precise than pharmaceuticals, and carbon-capture strategies that still defy full technological imitation.
Yet we remain blind to these marvels. Our anthropocentrism and movement-bias obscure what is hiding in plain sight: a world of silent, still, and supremely adapted intelligence. Engineers, architects, and designers could learn far more from the logic of leaf venation, the tensile strength of stems, or the fractal elegance of root systems than from any blueprint we’ve drawn.
Perhaps our gift—the reflective awareness plants lack—can be used to bridge this gulf. We can compare realities. We can marvel. We can learn. Plants do not ‘think’ as we do, but they embody solutions so elegant, so deeply integrated into the world’s functioning, that it’s clear: evolution is cleverer than we are.
The pulse of plant agency is grounded in biological agency – the propensity of all living organisms to survive, reproduce and flourish. It is this mindless plant agency that sustains all life on Earth.
Related articles
This article is one of a series investigating a 'new biology' that gives full consideration to biological agency and its relationship to human agency. These articles are introduced in the article on biological explanation which considers the forward-looking biological explanatory emphasis on ends, goals, purposes, functions, and agency. Much of the discussion revolves around the scientific appreciation and accommodation of real (genetically inherited) purposive (teleological, teleonomic) goal-directedness (agency) that is a universal distinguishing feature of life. The series also discusses the nature of biological classification and the way we classify 'everything' in our worldviews and modes of representation.
Human agency is a limited, conscious, and highly evolved form of biological agency. 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 biological agency that gave rise to human bodies and human subjectivity - that, in this temporal sense, biological agency is prior to human agency.
The suite of articles exploring biological agency ranges across topics in theoretical biology and the philosophy of biology, including:
Processes - how biology is more concerned with process than structure or things.
Synthesis and analysis - the biological legacy of analytical reductionism.
What is life? - the crucial role of organisms and their agency agency in determining purpose, values, and what it is to be alive. How agency gives meaning to biological structures, processes, and behavior and must therefore take precedence in biological explanation.
Biological axiom - how this biological principle establishes the necessary behavioral (agential) conditions for all life as the universal, objective, and ultimate biological goals that give organisms - including their structures, processes, and behaviors - biological meaning.
Purpose - the history of the notion of purpose (teleology) including eight potential sources of purpose in biology.
Biological agency - as an account 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 goal-directed organismal behavioral propensities that express a universal behavioral orientation or perspective on existence (biological normativity).
Evolution of biological agency - the actual evolutionary emergence of human agency out of biological agency.
Plant sense, Plants make sense, and Plant intelligence addressing the rapidly developing research field of pre-cognitive agency in plants.
Biological hierarchy - the explanatory problem of levels, scales, and perspectives in biology.
The organism - the case for an organism-centered biology in which organisms as biological agents are the foundational functional units of biological organization.
Structures, processes, and behaviors - an introduction to biology that avoids the confusion of 'levels of existence'.
The biological axiom establishes the necessary behavioral (agential) conditions for all life. These are the universal, objective, and ultimate biological goals that give structures, processes, and behaviors biological meaning. Without at least an implicit understanding of these goals, biological explanations are an incoherent collection of unrelated facts so, in this sense, agency and function take explanatory precedence in biology. The structures, processes, and behaviors that make up the subject matter of biology may be compared in terms of both their structural-evolutionary history and functional equivalence.
The internal processing required to generate the organismal behavior summarized in the biological axiom can be conceptually framed as biological cognition. On this understanding human cognition[8] is a species-specific and highly evolved form of biological cognition. Theoretical biology does not have a terminology to distinguish between structurally different but functionally equivalent forms of biological cognition. It therefore resorts to the terminology of human cognition (as cognitive metaphor). Though word meanings cannot be changed at will, in science it is possible to refine categories and concepts to better represent the world.[73]
APS Glossary
Agency – the capacity of a living system to initiate and coordinate actions that sustain its own viability. Agency involves sensing, responding, regulating, and adapting in ways that preserve the system's identity. It is the defining condition of life—not a metaphor, but a biologically grounded property.
Agent – a system that enacts agency. In APS, an agent is any living process that actively maintains itself through internal regulation and external interaction. Agents can be as small as a cell or as large as an ecosystem, depending on the scale of coordinated activity.
APS Framework (Agency–Process–Scale) - A theoretical framework that redefines life in terms of biological agency (self-organizing, goal-directed activity), process (dynamic, self-sustaining organization), and scale (multilevel and temporal coordination). APS provides a naturalized, non-reductionist foundation for understanding living systems, emphasizing causality, function, and evolution as emergent from agent-driven processes across scales. It offers a coherent alternative to gene-centrism and mechanistic reductionism, restoring purpose and cognition as scientifically valid, biologically grounded concepts.
Behavior – the outward expression of agency through activity that modifies internal or external conditions. Behavior includes movement, chemical signaling, structural change, and interaction with the environment. It reflects the agent’s ongoing effort to meet its biological imperative.
Biological Imperative – the intrinsic tendency of living systems to maintain and regenerate the conditions necessary for their own existence. This imperative drives all forms of biological activity and makes agency necessary. It is not an externally imposed goal but a built-in demand of being alive.
Causation - Reciprocal - Short defn: Mutual influence among system components, where each affects and is affected by the others over time. Long defn: Reciprocal causation refers to the dynamic interplay among components of a system, in which each influences and is influenced by the others over time. Rather than proceeding in a single direction, causality unfolds through feedback loops and context-sensitive regulation, such that system behavior emerges from ongoing mutual adjustments. This form of causation is central to biological systems—for example, in gene–environment interactions, where genes shape phenotypes that alter environments, which in turn affect gene expression, or in organism–niche co-construction, where organisms modify their environments in ways that reshape their own future evolution. Reciprocal causation resists simple, linear explanation, emphasizing that biological systems are co-determined and dynamically coordinated. Recursive - Short defn: Self-reinforcing or self-modifying causation, where processes re-enter and influence their own conditions over time. Long defn: Recursive causation refers to causal processes that re-enter or act upon themselves, generating iterative, history-sensitive effects. Unlike linear causation, which moves from cause to effect in a one-way sequence, recursive causation involves cycles in which prior states shape current dynamics, and present activity modifies future potential. This is fundamental to biological systems where development, regulation, learning, and evolution all depend on processes that are both shaped by and shape their own trajectories. For example, developmental feedback loops can alter gene expression patterns that persist into adulthood, and evolutionary change can restructure the very conditions that govern further selection. Recursive causation enables living systems to sustain themselves while flexibly reorganizing over time. While both reciprocal and recursive causation describe non-linear dynamics, they differ in structure: reciprocal causation involves mutual influence among distinct components, whereas recursive causation describes re-entry of influence within a single process across time. Both are essential to understanding biological agency, where living systems do not merely respond to causes, but co-create and modulate their own conditions of existence.
Cognition – the capacity of living systems to sense, evaluate, and respond to their environment in ways that are functionally meaningful. In APS, cognition is not limited to nervous systems but is a general property of biological agents, enabling adaptive behavior and regulation.
Functional Primacy – APS departs from the traditional symmetry between structure and function by prioritizing function—understood as dynamic, regulatory activity—as foundational to biological identity. While structure provides the physical substrate, it is the capacity to coordinate and sustain life-sustaining processes that defines agency and purpose.
Inheritance – the process by which biological systems pass on the capacity for agency and regulation—not just genetic information but functional organization and context-sensitive responses. APS treats inheritance as multiscale and processual, encompassing both material and behavioral continuity.
Level – a conceptual framework that organizes biological systems into discrete, often hierarchical strata such as genes, cells, tissues, organisms, and ecosystems. APS critiques the reification of levels as fixed tiers, emphasizing processual continuity and relational integration.
Life – a living system is one that actively generates, sustains, and regulates its own organized existence through agential, processual, and scale-dependent interactions with its environment. Life is not defined by any single structural feature (e.g., DNA, cells), but by the dynamic organization that enables persistence, adaptive regulation, and evolutionary continuity. This definition distinguishes the living from the inanimate and dead by grounding life in biological agency—the capacity to initiate and coordinate self-sustaining activity across multiple interacting spatial and temporal scales.
Naturalized Cognition – APS reinterprets cognitive terms such as thinking, wanting, or feeling as biological functions rather than mental states. Cognition is treated as a scalable, evolutionarily grounded property that manifests through functional behavior, not mental experience.
Naturalized Purpose – purpose understood as an intrinsic, biologically grounded outcome of agency. APS rejects supernatural, mental, or externally imposed teleology, framing purpose as the evolved tendency of living systems to persist and regulate themselves in adaptive, goal-directed ways.
Organism – a coherent, multiscale biological system that constitutes a locus of agency, integrating internal processes to regulate, maintain, and adapt its own conditions of existence. Organisms are individuated by functional integration and evolutionary continuity, not just physical boundaries.
Persistence – the capacity of a biological system to sustain itself across time through ongoing regulation, repair, and adaptation. In APS, persistence is not mere survival but the active, coordinated maintenance of viability under changing conditions.
Process – the continuous, dynamic activity through which life is maintained, changed, and transmitted. APS treats life not as a thing but as a network of interdependent processes—metabolic, developmental, ecological, evolutionary—that together enact agency.
Scale – a relational and dynamic perspective used to examine biological phenomena according to the granularity or extent of process, interaction, or organization. In APS, scale is not hierarchical but situational: different processes or agents become salient at different scales depending on context.
Scaling – in APS, scaling refers to the relational understanding of how biological processes vary across degrees of organization—not as fixed “levels,” but as dynamic patterns of function and interaction. APS emphasizes both spatial and temporal scaling to capture the continuity of agency and function across time and structure.
Transformation – the reorganization of structure or function within a biological system that preserves or enhances its viability. Transformation occurs through development, adaptation, or evolution and is a central feature of life understood as a process.
First published on the internet – 1 March 2019
. . . 2 June 2023 – revision
. . . 5 August 2023 – minor editing
GLOBAL OCEANIC & TERRESTRIAL PHOTOTROPH ABUNDANCE – Sept 1997 to Aug. 2000.
As an estimate of autotroph biomass, it is only a rough indicator of primary production potential and not an actual estimate of it.
Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons – Accessed 9 September 2021
The Nature of Life
In contemporary science, life is often characterized as a subset of matter that has been shaped by natural selection. According to this widely accepted view, living systems are semi-autonomous entities whose form and function result from the accumulation of genetic information filtered through the sorting algorithm of evolution. Consciousness, in this framework, emerges as a further refinement in certain organisms, and human cognition is seen as a peak of complexity—distinguished by foresight, abstract reasoning, and language. This model implicitly treats life as an outcome of past selection acting on otherwise inert matter, with agency and purposiveness reserved for sentient or human organisms.
In contrast, the APS and biological imperative perspective reframes life not as a passive product of evolutionary sorting, but as a dynamic, self-organizing process grounded in biological agency. Life, in this view, is defined by an intrinsic imperative—to persist, grow, regenerate, and reproduce—manifest in the capacity of living systems to regulate themselves and interact adaptively with their environments. This imperative gives functional expression to the biological axiom, while agency provides the means by which it is enacted. Agency is not limited to sentient organisms; it is present from the simplest cells to the most complex ecosystems. Rather than drawing categorical boundaries between physics, life, and mind, APS emphasizes the continuity of processes across scales, where new forms of function and organization emerge through nested coordination.
Whereas mainstream views often treat life as a subset of matter governed by physical laws and historical selection, the APS framework sees life as a distinctive organization of matter—defined by its active, purposive engagement with the world. Consciousness and cognition are thus not departures from biology, but elaborations of this fundamental agential capacity. From this standpoint, the disjunctions often posited between inert matter, life, mind, and culture dissolve into a continuum of processes, unified by their capacity to sustain, coordinate, and evolve meaningful activity within complex environments.
Life, Agency, and the Biological Imperative
What is life? In the Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework, life is most coherently defined by the biological imperative—the intrinsic tendency of living systems to sustain, adapt, and regenerate their own organized existence across time. This imperative is not a metaphor or heuristic but a scientifically grounded propensity that unifies life’s continuity, coherence, and capacity for evolution.
The biological axiom—that organisms survive, reproduce, adapt, and evolve—describes what life must achieve. The biological imperative explains how: it expresses the internal drive that distinguishes living systems from non-living matter. Unlike any specific structure or trait, the imperative identifies a system-level orientation enacted through sustained, self-organizing activity.
Biological agency is the means by which the biological imperative is realized. Agency is the capacity of a system to coordinate internal processes and environmental interactions in ways that promote its own viability. It is not a fixed trait, but a dynamic, multiscale process—sensitive to context, shaped by evolution, and expressed in behavior. While the imperative defines the condition of being alive, agency defines how that condition is enacted and maintained in practice.
Genes contribute critically by storing and transmitting viable organizational patterns, and natural selection shapes which patterns persist. But neither genes nor selection define life in themselves. The biological imperative precedes them both: life emerges from the capacity to maintain functional coherence in the face of change. Without agency enacting this imperative, there would be no evolutionary process for selection to act upon. In this sense, selection shapes the forms agency takes, but agency underpins the evolutionary process itself.
The most direct manifestation of the biological imperative is behavior—the system-level coordination of perception, regulation, and action aimed at maintaining functional integrity. Such behavior is not confined to movement or sentience, but includes any organized, adaptive response to internal or external change, across all forms of life.
The biological imperative is not an external goal or fixed endpoint, but an emergent, internal orientation: the organized propensity of life to persist, adapt, and regenerate itself. Through this lens, life is defined not by structure or program, but by the agency that enacts this imperative across time. It is this integration of imperative and agency that grounds the APS framework’s naturalized, processual, and scalable theory of life.
The Organism
Biology is the study of agentive systems—their components, capacities, and coordinated interactions across scales. This perspective is foundational to the APS (Agency–Process–Scale) framework, which integrates organisms, their parts, and their ecological and evolutionary contexts within a unified, process-centered science of life.
The organism is a key unit of analysis in APS biology—analytically, methodologically, epistemically, and ontologically. As a coherent, self-maintaining, and adaptively regulated system, the organism exemplifies multiscale biological agency. It serves as a primary reference point for classification (as in species), ecological integration, and evolutionary transformation, and is central to biological description and explanation.
Although the parts of organisms—structures, processes, and behaviors, including genes and cells—exhibit localized autonomy and function, their agency is embedded within and coordinated by the higher-order adaptive dynamics of the whole organism. Organisms operate as multiscale, self-determining agents that integrate and regulate their components toward system-level goals. They therefore constitute major causal nexuses in the biological web of interdependence, expressing a degree of agential coherence not found at lower or broader organizational scales.
Overemphasis on explanatory 'levels' such as molecular genetics reflects a fragmented, hierarchical bias that obscures the organizing role of scale in biological systems (see biological hierarchy). The APS approach replaces this with a scale-sensitive framework grounded in functional integration and processual continuity.
Organisms are biological agents: they act on and respond to their conditions of existence in flexible, adaptive ways. While agency is often narrowly associated with sentience, intention, and deliberation—hallmarks of human cognition—it is more broadly manifested in the capacity of all organisms to pursue survival, reproduction, adaptation, and evolutionary persistence. Human agency is thus a complex, highly elaborated, and evolutionarily constrained subset of this general biological capacity.
Adaptation involves not only long-term genetic change but also short-term sensing, evaluation, and response—functions of biological cognition expressed across lineages and organizational scales. These informational and functional processes underlie agency and behavior, whether in bacteria or humans. Human cognition is a specialized, conscious variant of a more general, biologically grounded cognitive capacity.
As a functionally integrated, adaptive, and self-organizing system, the organism embodies a biologically cognitive 'self'—a natural subjectivity grounded in agency and process. This makes the organism a privileged scale for biological explanation within the APS framework, where scale is determined not by size or level but by functional coherence and agential integration.
Biological objects
The miracle of life is traditionally presented to student biologists through the categories and concepts of the hierarchy of biological organization. This presents a view of science that is grounded in ancient and ambiguous ideas about the structure of reality. Building biological understanding around the agency of organisms (their parts and communities) and the categories of structure, process, and behavior offers a more comprehensive, simple, and dynamic conceptual framework for contemporary biological investigation that is grounded in current biological research. It balances ontological rigor with pragmatic flexibility, which is important for both educational and research purposes by providing categories that are both philosophically sound and practically useful.
Structures: the tangible physical building blocks of biology, ranging from sub-organismal entities like molecules, genes, cells, tissues, and organs, to supra-organismal entities such as colonies, populations, ecosystems, and the biosphere.
Processes: the biochemical and physiological activities that sustain life, such as photosynthesis, homeostasis, growth, metabolism, and reproduction. Also the long-term changes addressed by evolutionary biology. These dynamic activities are often obscured when focusing solely on structural descriptions.
Behaviors: the actions and responses of organisms within their environment. These can be both minded and mindless, in both organisms and their parts, and are often goal-directed, even in a minimal sense, by having specific functions.
This tripartite classification reflects the historical development of biological investigation - as an inventory of static structures (histology, anatomy, morphology, taxonomy) to dynamic processes and functions (physiology, developmental biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, systems biology), and then behaviors and agency (ecology, ethology, psychology, cognition). It emphasizes that structures support processes and processes drive behaviors in dynamic interactions and responses, capturing the complexity and adaptability of life in a comprehensive way.
This progression of investigative categories shows how biology has increasingly integrated the concepts of time, change, function, and agency through the interplay of physical structures, functional processes, and adaptive behaviors. It is a tool that reflects the character of contemporary biology in a categorization that helps students progress logically from understanding physical makeup to exploring interactions in the real world, which underscores the educational value of the approach.
Agency & Cognition
Living organisms are canonical biological agents that demonstrate their autonomy as a unity of purpose - both in-principle as the behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, adapt, and evolve (biological axiom), and in-practice as the capacity to sustain, adapt and regenerate their own organized existence over time. Biological agency is therefore most apparent in their flexible and adaptive goal-directed behavior as they respond to their changing conditions. The diversity of biological structures, processes, and behaviors we see in the community of life represent the range of graded evolutionary adaptations that have arisen in response to these universal biological conditions.
Internal processes drive observable agential behavior and all organisms, if they are to adapt, must have the capacity, no matter how crude, to both represent and interpret their conditions of existence. Human cognition is conventionally associated with the coordinating activities of the brain and nervous system, but this mental form of cognition is just one manifestation of the many functionally equivalent internal processing systems that occur in all organisms. Human cognition is therefore a uniquely human specialized evolutionary response to the conditions of the biological axiom: it has functional equivalents in all other organisms and is collectively referred to as biological cognition.
Thus, biological agency is identified and explained primarily through observed external behavior while biological cognition is the less accessible functionally integrated internal processing that generates this behavior. Human agency and cognition are specialized, evolved responses to these existential conditions, expressed as biological agency and biological cognition.
The use of human cognitive terms like ‘experience,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘perception,’ ‘intelligence,’ ‘choices,’ ‘decisions,’ ‘learning,’ and ‘memory’ traditionally applies uniquely to humans. When used for non-human organisms, these terms denote functional equivalence, not direct evolutionary connection.
The challenge for theoretical biology is to find a descriptive language that distinguishes between uniquely human cognition and functionally equivalent biological cognition without resorting to cognitive metaphor or undermining functional equivalence.
Functions
In biology, function refers to the role or contribution a structure, process, or behavior makes to an living system's operation and viability. While often described mechanistically as "what something does," function is historically entangled with purpose—what something is for. To avoid teleological implications, biology has traditionally used ‘function’ as a neutral term, yet the language of purpose remains embedded in how we describe adaptations and traits.
Philosophical theories like the Selected Effects Theory define function in terms of historical selection—what a trait was selected for. While useful in some contexts, such accounts overlook the real-time coordination, normativity, and directionality inherent in living systems. The APS (Agency–Process–Scale) framework reframes function as the local contribution of a trait or process to the system-level activity of an agent. Purpose, in this view, refers to the organized tendencies of whole organisms to regulate, persist, and adapt. Human conscious goals are understood as complex expressions of this more fundamental biological purposiveness.
Functions are not just evolutionary outcomes but are embedded in ongoing processes of self-organization and regulation. They gain meaning through their role in sustaining the coherence of the system. As Aristotle recognized, the parts of organisms serve functions because the whole organism is the beneficiary—the one ‘for which’ those functions exist. APS integrates this insight within a naturalized framework of agency, showing that functional explanation in biology depends on recognizing how parts contribute to the coordinated, goal-directed activity of the whole.
Functional Equivalence
Biological objects may be compared from at least two evolutionary perspectives – their physical ancestry, and functional equivalence. So, for example, likening the behavior of humans and plants by talking about both plant cognition and human cognition does not necessarily mean that plant experiences are the same as human experiences. This is not an equivalence of evolutionary structures, processes, behaviors, and experiences (homologs) but an equivalence of functions (analogs).
Physical functional equivalence, such as the wings of birds and butterflies, can be empirically validated. However, psychological equivalence is more contentious as it relies on interpretive frameworks influenced by our understanding of consciousness and cognition. So, for example, saying a plant ‘wants’ water seems blatant cognitive metaphor.
Assuming human agency and human cognition are highly evolved forms of more general biological traits, functional equivalence becomes more scientifically meaningful since it is grounded in empirically verifiable traits that conform to the biological axiom (to survive, reproduce, adapt, and evolve). When we say a plant ‘wants’ water, we acknowledge its observable biological behavior in response to water stress. This shifts the perspective from metaphorical fiction to functional equivalence grounded in empirical reality, with metaphor serving as a heuristic tool that resonates with human understanding.
Functional equivalence is the real, observable phenomenon, while metaphor is the figurative language used to describe and relate to it.
Using human psychological terms for non-human organisms infers functional, not physical, equivalence. It does not suggest a meeting of minds but a comparison of strategies used to address the same selection pressures - an equivalence of ultimate biological goals. However, it does create a problem for the semantics of cognitive language (see human-talk).
Hierarchical thinking
The prioritization of actions is a critical ingredient of the goal-directedness of every biological agent, and represents a necessary agential property of adaptation. Within the APS framework, such prioritization emerges from the coordination of processes across scales to support continued viability. Every action, of every organism, is ‘about’ or ‘for’ something—an expression of agency oriented toward a prioritized focus of relevance within its current context of interaction.
In the limited agential case of the human self-conscious intellect, action is supplemented by thoughts and language, with every thought and sentence exhibiting a focal structure. This hierarchical organization of cognitive content reflects the same underlying principle: prioritization makes explanations, descriptions—and indeed thinking itself—possible. To explain is to foreground certain processes over others; to describe is to structure experience through ranked relevance. Even at the level of conscious awareness, the shifting hierarchy of focus reveals the dynamic, processual nature of biological agency as it continually reorders itself in response to changing internal and external conditions.
Ranking is, in this sense, a structured form of prioritization. While prioritization dynamically orders possibilities according to situational significance, ranking expresses these valuations as layered or nested levels of function, influence, or control. This produces hierarchical architectures within biological systems that guide behavior and cognition across scales—from molecular regulation to social organization.
Prioritization and ranking are not merely cognitive constructs but are core expressions of biological agency, shaping action, structuring thought, and enabling communication. Within the APS perspective, they are understood as intrinsic to the multiscale organization of life—emergent from biological processes and operational across nested levels of scale. It is precisely because this hierarchical structuring is so deeply embedded in our experience that we tend to reify it as a property of the world, rather than recognizing it as a product of agential systems acting purposively within their contexts of viability.
Life is not assembled from the bottom up or commanded from the top down, but woven from interdependent threads of causation. Across scales, processes constrain and enable one another, creating a self-sustaining fabric of organization where molecules, cells, and organisms co-shape their own possibilities. Causation here is reciprocal and relational, more like a tensioned web than a ladder, maintaining living order dynamically rather than imposing it from above or below.
Biological Normativity
Biological agency demonstrates that life is inherently value-laden: organisms do not act neutrally, but exhibit goal-directed behaviors that reflect functional ‘preferences.’ These values are not imposed but arise from within—expressions of the biological imperative: the intrinsic drive of living systems to persist, regulate themselves, and maintain functional coherence in dynamic environments.
This intertwining of fact and value dissolves the traditional divide between what is and what ought to be. Biological normativity emerges directly from the structural and behavioral organization of living systems. Organisms, as autonomous agents, evaluate their environments—not consciously, but through a kind of mindless normativity. They favor conditions that support their continued existence, thus expressing values through action.
All organisms share this imperative. Though expressed through diverse forms, each organism behaves in ways that are functionally equivalent—strategically aligned with persistence, regulation, and interaction. These shared functional standards constitute a universal, non-conscious 'code of behavior' inherent to life itself.
Human normativity and morality are elaborated expressions of this same biological basis—uniquely human, but continuous in kind. Moral codes and evaluative judgments are culturally evolved forms of biological normativity, rooted in the same imperative that governs all life.
Biological normativity reflects the inherent, agent-driven standards by which organisms navigate and value their world. It is the natural expression of the biological imperative—and the defining condition that sets the living apart from the inanimate.
