Ontogenesis, Organization, and Organismal Agency

(Yogi)

I gave an invited talk this week (online) for a workshop held in Paris with the title "Toward a science of intrinsic purposiveness: shaping development." This workshop was organized by our excellent colleagues and project collaborators Matteo Mossio and Ana Soto, and was sponsored by the "Agency, Directionality & Function" project of the John Templeton Foundation.

The talk is based on my essay on "Ontogenesis, Organization, and Organismal Agency," which is to appear as a book chapter in Jana Švorcová's "Organismal Agency: Biological Concepts and Their Philosophical Foundations" later this year.

The essay and the talk make a few very simple points:

• organismic development (ontogenesis) and agency are only indirectly related, through the fact that they both require organizational continuity (persistent closure of constraints) during the complete life cycle of an evolving reproducer (which is the minimal evolvable biological unit),
• this puts a sever constraint on the variability of an organism, which is what natural selection will act on,
• in return, it means that we cannot understand ontogenetic processes by purely mechanistic means (see the mechanical duck below); instead, some of their features will be determined by the global constraint of organizational continuity, i.e. the necessity to produce a complete life cycle,
• it is difficult to identify such constraints by purely theoretical considerations, they must be mapped using a comparative empirical approach to evolving ontogenetic processes that yields so-called cross-lineage explanations based on the concept of the homology of process,
• this requires a new research program (a work package, in Alan Love's terms) in developmental biology, which uses traditional molecular, genetic, and tissue-mechanical experimental approaches, but is guided by the new framework of cellular agent theory (developed by Mossio, Soto, and colleagues).

I intend to record the lecture and upload it to YouTube, so stay tuned! In the meantime, check out the preprint of the essay, which is also listed in our publications section.