marcel blattner | April, 2025
Image created by marcel blattner. 1Mio. Eigenvalues of a Bohemian Matrix with base pattern: base_pattern=[-1j,0,0.5]
Introduction: Rethinking Agency in Biology
A fascinating book by Philip Ball [1] makes the case for reconsidering how we think about agency and purpose in biological systems. While modern biology has largely avoided discussing notions of agency and goal-directedness, Ball argues that these concepts may be essential for understanding how organisms function and evolve.
Beyond the Gene-Centric Model
The traditional gene-centric view of evolution treats organisms primarily as vehicles for genes, with changes driven by random mutations and natural selection. However, this framework struggles to explain the rich complexity of how organisms actively interact with and shape their environments. Ball points to examples like bacterial chemotaxis – where bacteria purposefully navigate chemical gradients – as evidence that even simple organisms display genuine agency in pursuing goals.
Defining Biological Agency
What exactly constitutes biological agency? The book outlines several key criteria: First, agents must maintain a boundary between self and environment while still enabling flows of energy and matter. They need internal complexity and the ability to act independently rather than just responding mechanistically to stimuli. Perhaps most importantly, agents pursue goals and assign meaning to environmental signals based on those goals – a bacterium ignores chemical gradients irrelevant to its nutrition or survival.
Thermodynamic Roots of Agency
This agency appears to arise from thermodynamic principles. Like Maxwell’s demon, organisms use information about their environment to extract useful work and maintain their far-from-equilibrium state. They develop internal representations that allow them to anticipate and respond to changes. The book suggests that agency may have emerged naturally in prebiotic systems as a way to efficiently harvest environmental energy.
Agency Across Biological Scales
Importantly, agency operates across multiple scales in biology. Individual cells display agency in development and immune responses. These cellular agents can also participate in collective agency at the tissue and organism level. Understanding how agency manifests and coordinates across scales may be crucial for explaining phenomena like cancer, where cellular agency becomes misaligned with organismal goals.
Evolutionary Consequences of Agency
The implications for evolutionary theory are significant. If organisms actively shape their environments and development rather than being passive vehicles for genes, this suggests a more expansive view of evolution may be needed. Agency allows organisms to influence their own fitness landscape and potentially direct evolutionary trajectories through behavioral and developmental plasticity.
Avoiding Vitalism: A Naturalistic Framework
Some may worry that invoking agency risks introducing mystical or vitalistic thinking into biology. However, Ball argues that agency can be understood naturalistically through frameworks like thermodynamics, information theory, and dynamical systems. The challenge is developing rigorous theoretical tools to analyze how agency emerges and operates across biological systems.
New Research Frontiers
This perspective opens up fascinating research directions at the intersection of biology, physics, and complex systems science. How do goal-directed behaviors arise from molecular interactions? What principles govern collective agency? How does agency influence evolutionary dynamics? Making progress will likely require integrating insights across fields while maintaining scientific rigor.
Toward a Purpose-Informed Biology
The book makes a compelling case that understanding agency is essential for advancing biology, from development to evolution to medicine. Rather than avoiding discussion of purpose and goals in biology, we may need to embrace and formalize these concepts to fully explain how living systems work. This suggests an exciting path forward that enriches rather than contradicts existing biological frameworks.
A Holistic Perspective on Life
Ball’s analysis points to a more holistic view of biology where agency and purpose are seen as natural emergent properties rather than mystical additions. By developing better theoretical and experimental tools to study agency, we may gain deeper insight into the remarkable capacities of living systems to actively maintain, adapt and transform themselves across multiple scales of organization.
Source:
[1] Ball, P. (2023). How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. In How Life Works. University of Chicago Press.