Agency in Contemporary Biology

For much of the twentieth century, mainstream biology largely portrayed organisms as products of underlying mechanisms. Genes, biochemical pathways, developmental programs, and selective pressures were treated as the primary explanatory factors, while organisms themselves often appeared as the outcomes of processes operating upon them. Although this perspective generated enormous scientific advances, it also produced a recurring concern: living systems seemed increasingly described as passive objects rather than active participants in their own existence.

Over the last several decades, a growing number of biologists and philosophers of biology have challenged this picture. Across diverse research traditions, scholars have argued that living systems cannot be adequately understood unless their own activities are placed at the centre of explanation. Organisms do not merely undergo development, adaptation, and evolution. They actively regulate, modify, construct, and maintain the conditions under which these processes occur.

This broad movement has become one of the most significant developments in contemporary theoretical biology. Although the approaches involved differ substantially, they share a common conviction: living systems are agents rather than passive products of physical and evolutionary forces.

APS emerges within this intellectual context. Like many contemporary agency-oriented approaches, APS argues that agency is fundamental to life. However, APS also proposes a distinctive explanatory architecture. Rather than treating agency as simply one characteristic among others, APS argues that agency is the defining activity through which living systems maintain viability-oriented organised persistence across time.

The Return of Agency

The reappearance of agency within biology reflects several converging developments. Research in evolutionary theory increasingly emphasises the active role organisms play in shaping evolutionary outcomes, while developmental biology has highlighted the importance of organism–environment interactions throughout ontogeny. Studies of niche construction, developmental plasticity, ecological feedback, and behavioural modification have shown that organisms frequently influence the very conditions under which selection occurs. The picture that emerges is one in which organisms are not merely shaped by environments but also participate in shaping them.

At the same time, philosophers of biology have increasingly questioned explanatory frameworks that portray organisms primarily as collections of mechanisms. Process-oriented approaches have emphasised continuity, activity, and organisation, while autonomy theories have focused on the self-maintaining character of living systems. Although these traditions employ different conceptual vocabularies and often pursue different explanatory objectives, they converge upon a shared concern that biological explanation becomes incomplete when the active contribution of living systems disappears from view.

The result has been what may reasonably be described as an emerging agency tradition within contemporary biology. This tradition does not constitute a single unified theory. Rather, it consists of several overlapping research programs that approach biological activity from different directions while converging on the recognition that living systems are intrinsically active organisations whose own activities contribute to their persistence, development, and evolutionary transformation.

What Biologists Mean by Agency

The term agency often generates confusion because it is frequently associated with human psychology, conscious decision-making, or intentional behaviour. In contemporary theoretical biology, however, agency is generally understood in a broader and more fundamental sense. Agency need not imply consciousness, deliberation, symbolic thought, representation, or reflective awareness. Instead, agency refers to the capacity of a system to generate activities that contribute to the maintenance, regulation, or continuation of its own organisation.

This broader conception has emerged because many biological phenomena appear difficult to explain without recognising that living systems actively regulate themselves in relation to changing circumstances. Cells maintain internal conditions despite environmental fluctuations, organisms modify behaviour in response to opportunities and threats, and ecological systems are continually reshaped by the activities of the organisms that inhabit them. In each case, the relevant activities contribute to the continuation of organised biological processes rather than merely reflecting externally imposed causes.

At its most general, biological agency involves the generation of activity from within the organisation itself, the regulation of that activity in relation to changing conditions, and the maintenance of conditions supportive of continued existence. These features are closely related rather than independent. Activity becomes biologically significant because it contributes to regulation, and regulation becomes biologically significant because it contributes to continued viability. Agency therefore concerns not simply movement or responsiveness but organised activity directed toward the preservation of conditions necessary for ongoing existence.

For this reason, many contemporary agency-oriented theories argue that agency exists in forms that precede cognition and that provide the organisational foundations from which cognition later emerges. Rather than treating agency as an exclusively psychological phenomenon, these approaches increasingly treat agency as a fundamental biological phenomenon. The central question is no longer whether living systems exhibit agency, but how agency should be understood, explained, and integrated into biological theory.

Multiple Pathways Toward Agency

One of the most striking features of contemporary theoretical biology is that several largely independent research traditions have converged upon agency-oriented conclusions. Researchers working in evolutionary theory, developmental biology, autonomy theory, process philosophy of biology, and organism-centred approaches often employ different conceptual frameworks and address different scientific problems. Nevertheless, each tradition has encountered explanatory limitations in accounts that treat organisms as passive outcomes of underlying processes.

As a result, agency has reappeared under multiple names and within multiple theoretical contexts. In some cases it is discussed as organismal activity, in others as autonomy, self-maintenance, developmental regulation, niche construction, or processual organisation. Despite these differences, a common theme runs through much of the contemporary literature: living systems participate in the production and maintenance of the very conditions under which they persist.

The significance of this convergence should not be overstated. Important disagreements remain concerning the nature of agency, its relationship to autonomy, its role in evolution, and the explanatory status it should possess within biology. Yet the convergence itself is noteworthy because it suggests that agency is not merely a local concern within a single research tradition. Rather, it increasingly appears as a recurring theme emerging across multiple domains of biological inquiry.

The remainder of this article examines several of the most influential strands within this emerging agency tradition before considering how APS relates to, synthesises, and extends these developments.

Organism-Centred Evolution and Agency

One of the most influential attempts to restore agency to biology has emerged from organism-centred approaches to evolution. These approaches challenge the view that organisms are merely passive vehicles through which genes are transmitted or passive recipients of selective pressures imposed by external environments. Instead, organisms are understood as active participants whose activities contribute to shaping the evolutionary trajectories they subsequently experience.

The most systematic development of this perspective is found in the work of Denis Walsh. Walsh argues that evolutionary explanation becomes distorted when organisms are reduced to the outcomes of genetic programs and environmental forces. Organisms do not simply occupy environments; they actively engage with, modify, exploit, and transform them. Behavioural choices, developmental activities, ecological interactions, and environmental modifications all contribute to shaping the selective conditions under which future evolutionary change occurs. Evolution therefore cannot be adequately understood as a process acting upon passive entities because the organisms undergoing evolution simultaneously participate in producing the conditions that influence evolutionary outcomes.

This perspective represents an important corrective to strongly gene-centred interpretations of evolution. It restores the organism to the centre of evolutionary explanation and emphasises the reciprocal relationship between organisms and their environments. Evolution becomes not merely a process of external selection but a historical process in which living systems actively participate.

APS shares much with this organism-centred perspective. APS likewise rejects the portrayal of organisms as passive products of evolutionary forces and emphasises the active role living systems play in shaping their own developmental, ecological, and evolutionary circumstances. However, APS differs in the explanatory foundations it provides for this activity. Whereas organism-centred evolutionary theory begins with active organisms and explores the consequences of their activities for evolutionary processes, APS seeks to explain why organisms exhibit such activity in the first place. Agency is not introduced primarily as a feature of evolutionary participation. Rather, agency arises because living systems must continually maintain the conditions of their own viability. Organismal activity therefore appears not simply as an evolutionary factor but as an expression of viability-oriented organised persistence.

Biological Autonomy and Organisational Closure

A second major pathway toward agency has emerged through theories of biological autonomy. These approaches seek to explain what distinguishes living systems from other organised physical systems by focusing on the organisational relationships through which living systems maintain themselves.

The most influential account within this tradition has been developed by Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio. Their work emphasises the concept of organisational closure, according to which living systems consist of networks of mutually dependent constraints that collectively contribute to the maintenance of the organisation that produces them. Within such systems, biological activities are not externally imposed upon an otherwise passive structure. Rather, the organisation continually participates in generating and sustaining the conditions required for its own continued existence.

Autonomy theories therefore place self-maintenance at the centre of biological explanation. Living systems are understood as organisations that continually regenerate the very conditions that allow them to persist. This perspective provides a powerful account of biological individuality, organisational continuity, and the distinctive causal organisation characteristic of living systems. It also helps explain why biological systems exhibit forms of normativity that appear absent from most non-living systems. Because the organisation depends upon the continued maintenance of specific conditions, some processes become beneficial, others harmful, and still others destructive with respect to the persistence of the system.

APS shares substantial common ground with autonomy theory. Both frameworks reject purely mechanistic descriptions of living systems and emphasise organisation, continuity, and self-maintenance. Both regard living systems as active organisations rather than passive collections of components. In many respects, APS may be viewed as participating in the same broader movement away from reductionist conceptions of life.

At the same time, APS places greater emphasis on viability-oriented activity itself. Autonomy theory primarily seeks to explain how living systems achieve organisational self-maintenance through networks of mutually supporting constraints. APS asks a closely related but slightly different question: what is the defining activity through which such maintenance occurs? The APS answer is agency. Viability is not simply a consequence of organisational closure. Rather, viability is actively maintained through continual evaluative regulation directed toward preserving organised persistence. APS therefore places agency more explicitly at the centre of biological explanation while retaining many of the organisational insights developed within autonomy theory.

Developmental Agency and Organismic Biology

A particularly important contribution to the contemporary agency tradition has been made by Bernd Rosslenbroich and colleagues through their defence of organismic biology and developmental agency. Their work begins from the observation that living organisms exhibit forms of intrinsic activity that cannot be adequately captured by descriptions portraying them as passive products of genes, mechanisms, or environmental influences. Organisms actively regulate their development, modify their behaviour, and contribute to shaping their own futures.

Rosslenbroich argues that agency should be regarded as an inherent property of living organisms. From this perspective, agency is not a late evolutionary achievement confined to complex nervous systems or sophisticated cognition. Rather, agency characterises living systems from their most basic forms onward. The activities through which organisms regulate development, maintain organisation, and interact with environments already exhibit fundamental forms of agency long before cognition emerges in more specialised forms.

One of the strengths of this approach is its attempt to identify a continuum of agency extending across biological organisation. Agency appears not as an all-or-nothing property but as a phenomenon capable of developing increasingly complex forms. Basic organismic agency can therefore be understood as providing the foundation upon which more elaborate forms of behavioural flexibility, learning, planning, and cognition eventually emerge. This perspective helps integrate developmental biology, evolution, and organismal activity within a common conceptual framework.

APS is closely aligned with many of these conclusions. Both frameworks reject passive conceptions of living systems. Both regard agency as fundamental rather than peripheral to biological organisation. Both argue that agency precedes cognition and provides the basis from which more sophisticated forms of cognition can develop.

The principal difference lies in explanatory architecture. Rosslenbroich begins with living organisms and argues that agency is an inherent property of those organisms. APS begins at a deeper organisational level by asking what makes living systems possible as coherent entities in the first place. Its answer is viability-oriented organised persistence. Agency emerges within APS not simply because organisms possess it, but because maintaining viability across time requires continual regulation, evaluation, and adaptive activity. Agency therefore appears not merely as an inherent property of life but as the defining activity through which living organisation persists.

Developmental Systems, Plasticity, and Organism–Environment Relations

A further route toward agency has emerged through developmental systems approaches and related work on developmental plasticity, ecological development, and organism–environment interaction. Researchers such as Sonia Sultan and Armin Moczek have demonstrated that development cannot be adequately understood as the unfolding of internally specified genetic instructions. Development instead emerges through ongoing interactions among organisms, environments, ecological conditions, and developmental processes.

Within these perspectives, organisms actively participate in their own development. Developmental outcomes frequently depend upon environmental conditions, behavioural activities, ecological interactions, and developmental responses that cannot be reduced to genetic causes alone. Organisms therefore contribute to the construction of their own developmental trajectories through continual engagement with their surroundings.

This work has significantly expanded biological understanding of plasticity, niche construction, developmental responsiveness, and evolutionary innovation. It has also weakened traditional dichotomies separating organism and environment. Development increasingly appears as a relational process in which organisms and environments co-produce one another through ongoing interaction.

APS strongly agrees with these conclusions. Indeed, APS treats organism–environment coupling as one of the central features of living organisation. Organisms do not persist independently of their environments, nor are environments merely external contexts acting upon passive systems. Rather, viability emerges through ongoing interactions that continually reshape both organism and environment. Development therefore becomes one expression of the broader process through which living systems maintain organised persistence across changing conditions.

Nevertheless, APS seeks to integrate these insights within a more general explanatory framework. Developmental plasticity, environmental responsiveness, and niche construction are not treated as isolated biological phenomena. Instead, they are interpreted as particular manifestations of viability-oriented agency operating across developmental and evolutionary timescales. The significance of these phenomena therefore derives from their contribution to the maintenance and transformation of organised persistence rather than from development alone.

Process Biology and the Primacy of Activity

Another influential strand within the contemporary agency tradition has emerged through process-oriented philosophy of biology. Process approaches challenge the tendency to treat organisms as stable objects possessing fixed identities. Instead, organisms are understood as ongoing processes whose continuity depends upon continual activity and transformation.

The most influential articulation of this perspective is found in the work of Daniel Nicholson and John Dupré. Their processual view of biology emphasises that living systems persist despite continual material turnover, developmental change, ecological interaction, and evolutionary transformation. Organisms maintain continuity not because they remain materially identical through time but because organisational processes continue despite continual change.

This emphasis on process has important implications for understanding agency. If organisms are fundamentally processes rather than static objects, then activity is not something added to an already existing entity. Activity becomes constitutive of what the organism is. Living systems persist only because the processes that constitute them continue to occur.

APS shares substantial common ground with process biology and may be understood as extending several of its central insights. APS likewise rejects substance-based accounts of life and emphasises continuity through organised activity rather than material permanence. Living systems are understood as processes sustained across time rather than objects possessing fixed essences.

APS differs, however, in seeking to specify the organisational character of those processes more precisely. Process alone does not explain why some activities contribute to persistence while others contribute to breakdown. APS argues that the key organising principle is viability. Living processes are not merely ongoing; they are organised around maintaining the conditions required for continued persistence. Agency therefore acquires a specific explanatory role. It becomes the activity through which viability-oriented organisation regulates itself across changing circumstances. In this way APS incorporates processual insights while providing a more explicit account of why biological processes exhibit the organised, evaluative, and normative characteristics associated with life.

APS and the Emerging Agency Tradition

The diverse approaches examined above differ in their concepts, explanatory aims, and theoretical commitments. Organism-centred evolutionary theory emphasises the active role organisms play in shaping evolutionary trajectories. Autonomy theory focuses on organisational closure and self-maintaining systems. Developmental agency highlights the intrinsic activity of organisms throughout development and evolution. Developmental systems approaches emphasise the co-production of organisms and environments, while process biology foregrounds continuity through ongoing activity and transformation.

Despite their differences, these traditions converge upon a common conclusion. Living systems cannot be adequately understood as passive products of physical forces, genetic programs, or environmental influences. Across contemporary biology, organisms increasingly appear as active participants in the processes through which they persist, develop, and evolve.

APS emerges within this broader intellectual movement and shares many of its central commitments. APS agrees that agency is fundamental to life. It agrees that living systems actively contribute to the maintenance of their own organisation. It agrees that agency precedes cognition, that organism–environment relations are constitutive rather than incidental, and that biological explanation must account for the activities through which living systems sustain themselves across time.

At the same time, APS seeks to provide a more integrated explanatory architecture capable of connecting these insights within a single framework. Rather than beginning with organisms, autonomy, development, evolution, or process, APS begins with the problem of persistence itself. The central question is not simply why organisms exhibit agency, but why agency is required for living systems to exist as coherent entities at all.

APS argues that living systems are distinguished by viability-oriented organised persistence. Unlike many non-living systems, living systems must continually maintain the conditions necessary for their own continued existence. Persistence is therefore not passively inherited from physical structure but actively achieved through ongoing regulation. Viability becomes the central organisational problem confronting every living system because failure to maintain viability results in the loss of the organisation itself.

Agency emerges within this framework as the activity through which viability is maintained. Living systems must continually generate, regulate, and modify their activities in relation to changing circumstances because the conditions supporting persistence are never permanently secured. Agency therefore appears neither as a secondary characteristic nor as a specialised capacity possessed only by complex organisms. It is the ongoing activity through which living systems preserve the organisational conditions required for continued existence.

This perspective allows APS to connect agency to a broader explanatory sequence that extends beyond many existing agency theories. Because viability must be maintained, living systems must continually evaluate conditions as supportive, neutral, or threatening with respect to persistence. Evaluation therefore emerges directly from viability-oriented activity. Normativity subsequently emerges because some states, activities, and outcomes become better or worse relative to the maintenance of viability. Functions, malfunctions, purposes, and biological meanings can then be understood as consequences of this underlying organisational structure.

Within APS, the relationship among these concepts may be represented schematically:

Organised Persistence
          ↓
Viability
          ↓
Agency
          ↓
Evaluation
          ↓
Normativity

This sequence does not describe separate layers added onto one another. Rather, it describes increasingly explicit aspects of the same underlying organisation. Organised persistence generates the problem of viability. Viability requires agency. Agency entails evaluation. Evaluation generates normativity. Each element emerges from the organisational requirements established by the preceding one.

Agency as the Defining Activity of Life

The most significant difference between APS and many other agency-oriented approaches concerns the status assigned to agency itself. Most contemporary agency theories argue that living systems possess agency or that agency is an inherent property of organisms. APS accepts these claims but argues that they do not go far enough.

To say that organisms possess agency leaves open the question of why agency is present. Agency may then appear as one characteristic among many that living systems happen to exhibit. APS instead argues that agency occupies a more fundamental explanatory position. Living systems are not merely entities that possess agency. They are entities whose continued existence depends upon agency.

From this perspective, agency is not best understood as an attribute added to an already existing organism. Rather, agency is part of the ongoing activity through which the organism exists as a viable organisation. The persistence of living systems depends upon continual regulation, adaptation, repair, compensation, and reorganisation in response to changing conditions. Without such activity, viability deteriorates and organised persistence ceases.

This shift in emphasis has important implications. Agency becomes neither a specialised capacity nor a supplementary characteristic. It becomes constitutive of living organisation itself. The defining activity of life is therefore not metabolism, reproduction, information processing, adaptation, or any other isolated biological phenomenon. These activities acquire their significance because they contribute, directly or indirectly, to viability-oriented agency and the maintenance of organised persistence.

APS therefore reframes the relationship between life and agency. Rather than beginning with life and asking whether living systems possess agency, APS begins with agency as the activity through which organised persistence is maintained and asks how living systems emerge from that activity. In this sense, agency becomes not simply a feature of life but a central explanatory principle for understanding what life is.

Diagnostic Consequences

One of the distinctive consequences of the APS framework concerns the empirical investigation of life. Many theories identify agency as theoretically important but provide limited guidance regarding how agency might be recognised in unfamiliar systems. This limitation becomes particularly significant when addressing questions concerning minimal life, artificial systems, synthetic organisms, or potential extraterrestrial life.

APS approaches this problem by linking agency to viability-oriented organisation. If agency is the activity through which viability is maintained, then agency can be investigated by examining how systems respond to perturbations that threaten organisational continuity. The question becomes not merely whether a system exhibits activity, but whether that activity contributes to preserving the conditions required for continued persistence.

This perspective supports a diagnostic framework centred on perturbation, reorganisation, continuity analysis, and viability assessment. Systems exhibiting viability-oriented responses to changing conditions may therefore provide stronger evidence of biological organisation than systems displaying activity alone. In this way APS attempts to transform agency from a primarily conceptual category into an empirically tractable object of investigation.

The significance of this move extends beyond diagnosis. By connecting agency to observable organisational responses, APS provides a pathway through which theoretical claims about life may be subjected to empirical scrutiny. Agency becomes not only a philosophical concept but also a potential target for biological investigation.

Conclusion

The re-emergence of agency within contemporary biology represents one of the most important theoretical developments of recent decades. Across organism-centred evolution, autonomy theory, developmental biology, developmental systems approaches, and process philosophy of biology, researchers have increasingly recognised that living systems cannot be adequately understood as passive outcomes of underlying forces. Organisms actively participate in the processes through which they persist, develop, and evolve.

APS belongs within this emerging agency tradition and shares many of its central insights. Like these approaches, APS rejects passive conceptions of life and emphasises the active role organisms play in maintaining themselves across time. Yet APS also seeks to integrate these insights within a broader explanatory framework centred on viability-oriented organised persistence.

By grounding agency in the problem of viability, connecting agency to evaluation and normativity, and linking agency to diagnostic investigation, APS extends the contemporary agency tradition beyond the recognition that organisms are active. It seeks to explain why such activity is necessary, how it emerges from the requirements of persistence, and how it can be investigated empirically.

The result is a framework in which agency is not merely an inherent property of living systems but the defining activity through which living organisation persists. From this perspective, understanding life requires understanding the viability-oriented activities through which living systems continually sustain themselves in a changing world.