Evolution "On Purpose" Teleonomy in Living Systems

by Corning, Peter A.; Kauffman, Stuart A.; Noble, Denis; Shapiro, James A.; Vane-Wright, Richard I.

• ISBN13: 9780262546409
• ISBN10: 026254640X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780262376020
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-08-22
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• More Book Details

Summary

A unique exploration of teleonomy—also known as “evolved purposiveness”—as a major influence in evolution by a broad range of specialists in biology and the philosophy of science.

The evolved purposiveness of living systems, termed “teleonomy” by chronobiologist Colin Pittendrigh, has been both a major outcome and causal factor in the history of life on Earth.  Many theorists have appreciated this over the years, going back to Lamarck and even Darwin in the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the complex, dynamic process of evolution was simplified into the one-way, bottom-up, single gene-centered paradigm widely known as the modern synthesis. In Evolution “On Purpose,” edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross, some twenty theorists attempt to modify this reductive approach by exploring in depth the different ways in which living systems have themselves shaped the course of evolution.
Evolution “On Purpose” puts forward a more inclusive theoretical synthesis that goes far beyond the underlying principles and assumptions of the modern synthesis to accommodate work since the 1950s in molecular genetics, developmental biology, epigenetic inheritance, genomics, multilevel selection, niche construction, physiology, behavior, biosemiotics, chemical reaction theory, and other fields. In the view of the authors, active biological processes are responsible for the direction and the rate of evolution. Essays in this collection grapple with topics from the two-way “read-write” genome to cognition and decision-making in plants to the niche-construction activities of many organisms to the self-making evolution of humankind.  As this collection compellingly shows, and as bacterial geneticist James Shapiro emphasizes, “The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable.”

Author Biography

Peter A. Corning is Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems and Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University. He has been a science writer for Newsweek and has also authored seven books and more than 200 professional and print media articles.

Stuart A. Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He has published over 350 articles and 6 books: The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe, Investigations, Reinventing the Sacred, Humanity in a Creative Universe, and A World beyond Physics.

Denis Noble was Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford until 2004, when he retired and switched his focus to evolutionary biology. He is author of The Music of Life and Dance to the Tune of Life. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

James A. Shapiro is Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. He has published pioneering books on mobile genetic elements, natural genetic engineering, bacterial multicellularity, and read-write genome evolution.

Richard I. Vane-Wright is an entomologist associated with the Natural History Museum (London) for over 60 years. He now divides his time between studies on the history of entomology, butterfly systematics, the theory of evolution, and attitudes to nature and the conservation of biodiversity.

Addy Pross is Professor of Chemistry (Emeritus) at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests lie in the physics/chemistry-biology relationship and the origin of life problem. His pioneering book What Is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology has been published in close to a dozen languages.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword vii
Preface ix
1 Introduction 1
Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross
2 Teleonomy in Evolution: "The Ghost in the Machine" 11
Peter A. Corning
3 Cellular Basis of Cognition in Evolution: From Protists and Fungi Up to Animals, Plants, and Root-Fungal Networks 33
Frantisek Baluska, William B. Miller Jr., and Arthur S. Reber 
4 Constructing "On Purpose": How Niche Construction Affects Natural Selection 59
Dominik Deffner
5 Relational Agency: A New Ontology for Coevolving Systems 79
Francis Heylighen
6 Teleonomic Anticipatory Configurations in Biological Evolution: The Downward Dynamical Nature of Goal-Directedness 105
Abir U. Igamberdiev
7 From Teleonomy to Mentally Driven Goal-Directed Behavior: Evolutionary Considerations 119
Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg
8 Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm: A Statistical Mechanics of Emergence 141
Stuart A. Kauffman and Andrea Roli
9 On the Concept of Meaning in Biology 161
Kalevi Kull
10 Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis as a Teleonomic Process 175
Michael Levin
11 Form, Function, Agency: Sources of Natural Purpose in Animal Evolution 199
Stuart A. Newman
12 How Purposive Agency Became Banned from Evolutionary Biology 221
Denis Noble and Raymond Noble
13 Goal Attributions in Biology: Objective Fact, Anthropomorphic Bias, or Valuable Heuristic? 237
Samir Okasha
14 Toward the Physicalization of Biology: Seeking the Chemical Origin of Cognition 257
Robert Pascal and Addy Pross
15 Evolutionary Change Is Naturally Biological and Purposeful 275
James A. Shapiro 
16 Agency, Teleonomy, Purpose, and Evolutionary Change in Plant Systems 299
Anthony Trewavas 
17 Agency, Goal Orientation, and Evolutionary Explanations 325
Tobias Uller
18 Evolutionary Foundationalism: The Myth of the Chemical Given 341
Denis M. Walsh
Contributors 363
Index 365