Evolution On Purpose

Peter A. Corning is Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems and Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University. He has been a science writer for Newsweek and has also authored seven books and more than 200 professional and print media articles.


Stuart A. Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. He has published over 350 articles and six books: The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe, Investigations, Reinventing the Sacred, Humanity in a Creative Universe, and A World beyond Physics.


Denis Noble was Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford until 2004, when he retired and switched his focus to evolutionary biology. He is author of The Music of Life and Dance to the Tune of Life. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.


James A. Shapiro is Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago. He has published pioneering books on mobile genetic elements, natural genetic engineering, bacterial multicellularity, and read-write genome evolution.


Richard I. Vane-Wright is an entomologist associated with the Natural History Museum (London) for over 60 years. He now divides his time between studies on the history of entomology, butterfly systematics, the theory of evolution, and attitudes to nature and the conservation of biodiversity.


Addy Pross is Professor of Chemistry (Emeritus) at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests lie in the physics/chemistry-biology relationship and the origin of life problem. His pioneering book What Is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology has been published in close to a dozen languages.

Series Foreword vii
Preface ix
1 Introduction 1
Peter A. Corning, Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James A. Shapiro, Richard I. Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross
2 Teleonomy in Evolution: "The Ghost in the Machine" 11
Peter A. Corning
3 Cellular Basis of Cognition in Evolution: From Protists and Fungi Up to Animals, Plants, and Root-Fungal Networks 33
Frantisek Baluska, William B. Miller Jr., and Arthur S. Reber 
4 Constructing "On Purpose": How Niche Construction Affects Natural Selection 59
Dominik Deffner
5 Relational Agency: A New Ontology for Coevolving Systems 79
Francis Heylighen
6 Teleonomic Anticipatory Configurations in Biological Evolution: The Downward Dynamical Nature of Goal-Directedness 105
Abir U. Igamberdiev
7 From Teleonomy to Mentally Driven Goal-Directed Behavior: Evolutionary Considerations 119
Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg
8 Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm: A Statistical Mechanics of Emergence 141
Stuart A. Kauffman and Andrea Roli
9 On the Concept of Meaning in Biology 161
Kalevi Kull
10 Collective Intelligence of Morphogenesis as a Teleonomic Process 175
Michael Levin
11 Form, Function, Agency: Sources of Natural Purpose in Animal Evolution 199
Stuart A. Newman
12 How Purposive Agency Became Banned from Evolutionary Biology 221
Denis Noble and Raymond Noble
13 Goal Attributions in Biology: Objective Fact, Anthropomorphic Bias, or Valuable Heuristic? 237
Samir Okasha
14 Toward the Physicalization of Biology: Seeking the Chemical Origin of Cognition 257
Robert Pascal and Addy Pross
15 Evolutionary Change Is Naturally Biological and Purposeful 275
James A. Shapiro 
16 Agency, Teleonomy, Purpose, and Evolutionary Change in Plant Systems 299
Anthony Trewavas 
17 Agency, Goal Orientation, and Evolutionary Explanations 325
Tobias Uller
18 Evolutionary Foundationalism: The Myth of the Chemical Given 341
Denis M. Walsh
Contributors 363
Index 365