A unique exploration of teleonomy-also known as "evolved purposiveness"-as a major influence in evolution by a broad range of specialists in biology and the philosophy of science.The evolved purposiveness of living systems, termed "teleonomy" by chronobiologist Colin Pittendrigh, has been both a major outcome and causal factor in the history of life on Earth. Many theorists have appreciated this over the years, going back to Lamarck and even Darwin in the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the complex, dynamic process of evolution was simplified into the one-way, bottom-up, single gene-centered paradigm widely known as the modern synthesis. In Evolution "On Purpose," edited by Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross, some twenty theorists attempt to modify this reductive approach by exploring in depth the different ways in which living systems have themselves shaped the course of evolution.Evolution "On Purpose" puts forward a more inclusive theoretical synthesis that goes far beyond the underlying principles and assumptions of the modern synthesis to accommodate work since the 1950s in molecular genetics, developmental biology, epigenetic inheritance, genomics, multilevel selection, niche construction, physiology, behavior, biosemiotics, chemical reaction theory, and other fields. In the view of the authors, active biological processes are responsible for the direction and the rate of evolution. Essays in this collection grapple with topics from the two-way "read-write" genome to cognition and decision-making in plants to the niche-construction activities of many organisms to the self-making evolution of humankind. As this collection compellingly shows, and as bacterial geneticist James Shapiro emphasizes, "The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable."

Series Foreword viiPreface ix1 Introduction 1Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross2 Teleonomy in Evolution: "The Ghost in the Machine" 11Peter A. Corning3 Cellular Basis of Cognition in Evolution: From Protists and Fungi Up to Animals, Plants, and Root-Fungal Networks 33Frantisek Baluska, William B. Miller Jr., and Arthur S. Reber 4 Constructing "On Purpose": How Niche Construction Affects Natural Selection 59Dominik Deffner5 Relational Agency: A New Ontology for Coevolving Systems 79Francis Heylighen6 Teleonomic Anticipatory Configurations in Biological Evolution: The Downward Dynamical Nature of Goal-Directedness 105Abir U. Igamberdiev7 From Teleonomy to Mentally Driven Goal-Directed Behavior: Evolutionary Considerations 119Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg8 Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm: A Statistical Mechanics of Emergence 141Stuart A. Kauffman and Andrea Roli9 On the Concept of Meaning in Biology 161Kalevi Kull10 Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis as a Teleonomic Process 175Michael Levin11 Form, Function, Agency: Sources of Natural Purpose in Animal Evolution 199Stuart A. Newman12 How Purposive Agency Became Banned from Evolutionary Biology 221Denis Noble and Raymond Noble13 Goal Attributions in Biology: Objective Fact, Anthropomorphic Bias, or Valuable Heuristic? 237Samir Okasha14 Toward the Physicalization of Biology: Seeking the Chemical Origin of Cognition 257Robert Pascal and Addy Pross15 Evolutionary Change Is Naturally Biological and Purposeful 275James A. Shapiro 16 Agency, Teleonomy, Purpose, and Evolutionary Change in Plant Systems 299Anthony Trewavas 17 Agency, Goal Orientation, and Evolutionary Explanations 325Tobias Uller18 Evolutionary Foundationalism: The Myth of the Chemical Given 341Denis M. WalshContributors 363Index 365