Ontogenesis, Organisation, and Organismal Agency

(Yogi)

It's always a long wait until book chapters are finally officially released... This one was first published as a preprint in June, 2022, and is now finally available as part of Jana Švorcová's edited book on "Organismal Agency."

In this essay, Yogi examines the connections (if any) between theoretical research on organismal agency and experimental work in cell and developmental biology. There are three main insights: (1) the two fields of investigation are only indirectly connected, through the fact that both agency and the overall constraints that act on physiology and development are grounded in the self-manufacturing organization of the organism; (2) these global constraints, which are required to maintain organizational continuity and are a prerequisite for life and its evolution, put strict limits on the form that ontogenetic processes can take (and their understanding is therefore necessary if we are to understand the nature of such processes), and (3) in multicellular development, agency comes into play through the behavior of individual cells as units of organismal ontogenesis.

This lays the foundation for research within our project, which examines the limits of current experimental and modeling practices in biology, and potential methodologies to transcend those limits.