The key ideas of natural selection are commonly presented in the form of a core logic, or algorithm, that leads, with absolute certainty, to meaningful evolution. In reality, this logic is empty, and all the meaning depends upon what organism-agents actually do. By itself,...

All biological description involves narrative (story-like) elements, including purposiveness, intention, and, in general, more-than-physical meanings. But, while employing such description constantly, biologists prefer not to acknowledge it or account for it in their the...

Every organism, and indeed every significant biological entity from a cell on up, is a governing context that informs and disciplines its own parts, while also participating in larger contexts; and the governance is established by the interwoven ideas that make the contex...

The cytoskeleton and cellular membranes illustrate both the integral unity of the cell and also the temptation to isolate parts in our thought as ‘controlling’ causes. In reality, we discover in every cell the power of the whole to express itself through its parts.

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...