Today 12:05 AM
https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-life-j...-20260708/
EXCERPT: To me, the notion of agency indeed speaks to our intuitive sense of what makes living things so special: not mere machines pushed around by environment and circumstance. I suspect that aversion to agency betrays a queasiness about confronting life as something more than some kind of genetic program. But there’s danger in the idea, too: It could so easily derail the work of studying the mechanistic explanations of how life works. I’m not looking to either bury or praise agency, but to explore whether it can be a scientifically productive idea.
To say that living things are goal-directed isn’t really a controversial statement. Biologists ranging from the evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to the pioneer of molecular biology Jacques Monod have acknowledged that. Whether it’s a bird building a nest or a white blood cell chasing a bacterium, we can’t watch life at work without supposing that these entities are trying to accomplish something.
The agency arguments are about what that means. In one view, apparent goal-directedness is just the result of genetic instructions playing themselves out. Organisms are automata directed by their genes, and natural selection favors gene variants that make the organisms behave one way and not another. In this mechanistic, gene-centered view of life, apparent agency is merely the performance of automated routines refined over many generations.
Is that really all there is to life? It’s far from clear that all organismal behavior can be attributed to particular genes. Think of a hare fleeing from a fox. Sure, its genes are involved in the formation of networks of neurons that enable behaviors that contribute to a state of not being eaten. But are genes responsible somehow for the decision to dart to the left or right, to hide or to run, or even to stand and fight?
Genetics might impose behavioral biases (say, making a hare generally risk-averse), but organisms make decisions by integrating a wealth of contextual and contingent information on the fly, including learned experience. In one view, agency is neither more nor less than this ability to set proximal goals — not “Shall I reproduce some day?” but rather, “What action shall I take right now?” — and then act upon oneself and one’s environment to attain them.
“I understand agency to be the capacity of an entity to act in the world, for reasons [of its own],” said the neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell(opens a new tab) of Trinity College Dublin, whose 2023 book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will(opens a new tab) presented an argument for how this capacity developed through evolution. “I think all living organisms can act as causal entities,” he said — not as mere vehicles steered by genetic prompts, but as agents that can be meaningfully said to be a genuine cause of change in the world. We wouldn’t say it was your atoms that caused your coffee to get made this morning, nor was it really your genes. It was you, a decision-making agent, who made that happen.
Mitchell is wary of rigid definitions, however... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: To me, the notion of agency indeed speaks to our intuitive sense of what makes living things so special: not mere machines pushed around by environment and circumstance. I suspect that aversion to agency betrays a queasiness about confronting life as something more than some kind of genetic program. But there’s danger in the idea, too: It could so easily derail the work of studying the mechanistic explanations of how life works. I’m not looking to either bury or praise agency, but to explore whether it can be a scientifically productive idea.
To say that living things are goal-directed isn’t really a controversial statement. Biologists ranging from the evolutionary theorist Ernst Mayr to the pioneer of molecular biology Jacques Monod have acknowledged that. Whether it’s a bird building a nest or a white blood cell chasing a bacterium, we can’t watch life at work without supposing that these entities are trying to accomplish something.
The agency arguments are about what that means. In one view, apparent goal-directedness is just the result of genetic instructions playing themselves out. Organisms are automata directed by their genes, and natural selection favors gene variants that make the organisms behave one way and not another. In this mechanistic, gene-centered view of life, apparent agency is merely the performance of automated routines refined over many generations.
Is that really all there is to life? It’s far from clear that all organismal behavior can be attributed to particular genes. Think of a hare fleeing from a fox. Sure, its genes are involved in the formation of networks of neurons that enable behaviors that contribute to a state of not being eaten. But are genes responsible somehow for the decision to dart to the left or right, to hide or to run, or even to stand and fight?
Genetics might impose behavioral biases (say, making a hare generally risk-averse), but organisms make decisions by integrating a wealth of contextual and contingent information on the fly, including learned experience. In one view, agency is neither more nor less than this ability to set proximal goals — not “Shall I reproduce some day?” but rather, “What action shall I take right now?” — and then act upon oneself and one’s environment to attain them.
“I understand agency to be the capacity of an entity to act in the world, for reasons [of its own],” said the neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell(opens a new tab) of Trinity College Dublin, whose 2023 book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will(opens a new tab) presented an argument for how this capacity developed through evolution. “I think all living organisms can act as causal entities,” he said — not as mere vehicles steered by genetic prompts, but as agents that can be meaningfully said to be a genuine cause of change in the world. We wouldn’t say it was your atoms that caused your coffee to get made this morning, nor was it really your genes. It was you, a decision-making agent, who made that happen.
Mitchell is wary of rigid definitions, however... (MORE - missing details)