The fact of purposive activity — the obvious play of active agency, the coordination of means toward the realization of relatively stable ends, and the undeniable evidence that animals perceive a world and interpret their perceptions according to their own way of life —...

We in the twenty-first century have inherited a rich and extensive library of descriptive literature about living things, their habitats, and their mutual relations, bequeathed to us over the centuries by dedicated naturalists. Unfortunately, in this age of molecular biol...

As soon as we are willing to acknowledge the organism as a purposive agent, everything in our evolutionary theory needs to be thought differently. Among other consequences, we discover evolution to be a purposive and directional process in much the same sense as ontogeny (in...

Few biologists are reticent about their conviction that organisms are machine-like and have been “tinkered” with throughout evolutionary history by a designer capable of producing intelligent results — all without any intelligent aid from organisms themselves. The desig...

Does evolutionary theory explain the origin and reality of purposiveness in the life of organisms? Or does the reality of purposiveness point us toward severe and disabling inadequacies in the reigning versions of the theory? This is a large and ambitious article — the fi...

Molecular biologists have spent several decades trying to identify how “one thing causing another” explains the organism. It is a simplistic and decontextualized way of looking that ends up in radical falsehood. The study of genes and their expression shows us that the org...

It makes little sense to try to explain how intelligence arises in organisms, given that we see nothing but intelligence there — for example, in the processes producing the brain. The really interesting challenge is to distinguish the intelligence at work in our bodies fro...

Confusion over the meaning of “epigenetics” reflects fundamental confusion about the nature of organisms and biological causation. Epigenetics really points us to the intentional activity of the whole organism — an activity in which DNA is caught up. The organism is ma...

You’ll have a hard time believing how the invisible microbes within us function as part of our own life. And perhaps not so hard a time believing how biologists are tempted immediately to regard particular microorganisms as opportunities for exerting neat control over every...

A study of plant form reveals that organic form is a causal principle; in a very real sense, it is form that brings about its own physical embodiment, not physical interactions that bring about form. A realization of this truth would radically transform biological thinkin...