DiFrisco James, Gawne Richard
Theoretical Biology Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute, London, United Kingdom.
Department of Natural History, Nevada State Museum - Las Vegas, Las Vegas, United States.
J Evol Biol. 2025 Feb 1;38(2):143-156. doi: 10.1093/jeb/voae153.
This paper evaluates recent work purporting to show that the "agency" of organisms is an important phenomenon for evolutionary biology to study. Biological agency is understood as the capacity for goal-directed, self-determining activity-a capacity that is present in all organisms irrespective of their complexity and whether or not they have a nervous system. Proponents of the "agency perspective" on biological systems have claimed that agency is not explainable by physiological or developmental mechanisms, or by adaptation via natural selection. We show that this idea is theoretically unsound and unsupported by current biology. There is no empirical evidence that the agency perspective has the potential to advance experimental research in the life sciences. Instead, the phenomena that the agency perspective purports to make sense of are better explained using the well-established idea that complex multiscale feedback mechanisms evolve through natural selection.
本文评估了近期的一些研究工作，这些工作声称生物体的“能动性”是进化生物学需要研究的一个重要现象。生物能动性被理解为具有目标导向、自我决定活动的能力——所有生物体都具备这种能力，无论其复杂程度如何，也无论它们是否拥有神经系统。生物系统“能动性视角”的支持者声称，能动性无法通过生理或发育机制，或通过自然选择导致的适应来解释。我们表明，这一观点在理论上是不合理的，且未得到当前生物学的支持。没有经验证据表明能动性视角有推动生命科学实验研究的潜力。相反，能动性视角试图阐释的那些现象，用已确立的观点来解释会更好，即复杂的多尺度反馈机制是通过自然选择进化而来的。
