Where This Article Fits

This article places APS within the contemporary biological agency debate and assesses what agency can presently contribute to biological explanation. It differs from Agency as the Defining Activity of Life, which develops the foundational APS account of life and biological agency, and from the general APS articles on biological explanation, which establish the wider methodology for explanatory comparison and explanatory gain. Here the focus is specifically comparative: contemporary approaches to agency are reconstructed alongside APS, and claims for agency are tested against their strongest relevant alternatives. The article therefore provides a bridge between APS’s conceptual foundations and its more specialised agency research, while keeping explanatory, integrative, and communicative contributions distinct.

Why Agency Has Returned to Biology

The idea that living organisms are active participants in their own existence is not new. Biological thought has long concerned itself with the capacities of organisms to maintain their conditions of life, regulate their activities, develop in relation to their surroundings, and contribute to their own persistence. What has changed in contemporary theoretical biology is the renewed attention given to these activities when explaining biological organisation, development, evolution, and organism–environment relations.

This renewed attention is sometimes described as an agential turn. The expression is useful as a description of a broad intellectual tendency, but it can also mislead. There is no single, agreed theory of biological agency underlying the different approaches that have emerged. Some explicitly propose criteria for identifying biological agents. Others seek to restore the organism to evolutionary explanation, investigate the organisational autonomy of living systems, emphasise developmental plasticity, or argue that biological processes cannot adequately be understood as the activities of fixed and independently existing things. These approaches have overlapping concerns, but they do not necessarily share explanatory targets, definitions, or theoretical commitments.

From Organisms as Products to Organisms as Participants

A familiar explanatory emphasis in modern biology has been to account for organisms through the processes that produce and transform them: genetic inheritance, development, physiological regulation, ecological interaction, and natural selection. These explanations remain indispensable. Yet they can encourage an incomplete picture if organisms appear only as the outcomes of processes whose causal organisation is described independently of what organisms themselves do.

Organisms maintain internal conditions, respond to environmental changes, construct and modify surroundings, alter developmental trajectories, and participate in ecological relationships. Their activities can affect the circumstances under which they survive, reproduce, and undergo evolutionary change. The organism is therefore not merely something to be explained; its activity can also be part of the explanation.

This emphasis has several intellectual sources. Organism-centred evolutionary approaches question whether evolutionary explanation gives sufficient attention to what organisms do in their particular circumstances (Walsh 2015). Theories of biological autonomy investigate the organisation through which living systems sustain their own conditions of existence (Moreno and Mossio 2015). Developmental plasticity research examines how development responds to environmental circumstances and how such responsiveness can affect evolutionary trajectories (Sultan 2015). Evolutionary developmental biology investigates relationships among development, phenotypic production, and evolutionary change (Nadolski and Moczek 2023). Process-oriented philosophy questions whether the apparent stability of biological individuals is better understood through continuing organised activity (Nicholson and Dupré 2018).

These contributions do not all advocate the same concept of agency. Their common significance lies in directing attention to activities and dependencies that can be obscured when organisms are represented as passive products of external causes.

Activity Does Not by Itself Establish Agency

The return of the active organism must nevertheless be distinguished from the attribution of biological agency.

An organism may alter its environment without every environmental alteration constituting an instance of agency. A physiological process may contribute to maintaining an organism without itself being an independent agent. A developmental response may have evolutionary consequences without agency providing the most informative explanation of those consequences.

Similarly, recognising that biological organisation is processual does not establish that every biological process is an agent. The causal importance of a component, its participation in regulation, or its contribution to a wider system does not automatically establish an independent agent at the scale of that component.

These distinctions matter because biological agency is sometimes invoked to emphasise the causal importance of living activity, sometimes to identify a particular kind of biological organisation, and sometimes to propose a different explanatory perspective. Those uses should not be treated as interchangeable.

The contemporary discussion therefore raises questions that must be kept separate. Are organisms genuinely agents, and according to what criteria? When is it scientifically useful to represent biological systems as agents? Does agency attribution identify dependencies not adequately captured by established explanations? Can a common agency vocabulary improve conceptual integration or communication across biological domains?

The answers may differ. A defensible ontological attribution need not improve a particular explanation. A useful modelling strategy need not establish that the modelled system possesses all the properties ordinarily associated with agents. And a concept that assists communication need not identify a previously unknown biological mechanism.

The significance of the contemporary agency discussion lies partly in bringing these questions into sharper focus. Its scientific value depends on how precisely they are answered, rather than on how widely agency terminology is adopted.

What Is Meant by Biological Agency?

The expression biological agency has no single universally accepted meaning. It is used in discussions of behaviour, evolution, autonomy, cognition, development, regulation, and biological individuality. In some contexts it refers to organisms pursuing goals; in others to the capacity of living systems to maintain themselves, to regulate their interactions with environments, or to contribute actively to evolutionary outcomes.

The resulting differences are not merely terminological. Different definitions can identify different candidates as agents, attribute different capacities to them, and support different kinds of explanation.

A productive starting point is therefore to ask not whether a particular account uses the word agency, but what it means by that word, which biological systems qualify, and what explanatory work the attribution is expected to perform.

Ontological Agency and Agential Interpretation

One important distinction is between claiming that a biological system genuinely possesses agency and treating it as an agent for some explanatory or modelling purpose.

An ontological claim concerns what the system is and how it is organised. It requires criteria for determining whether agency belongs to the biological organisation under investigation. Such criteria might concern self-maintenance, autonomous organisation, regulation, goal-directed activity, or the relationships through which a system maintains its individuality.

A heuristic or modelling claim has a different status. A researcher may find it useful to describe a system in terms of goals, strategies, interests, or choices without thereby establishing that the system possesses agency in the strongest ontological sense. Agential interpretation may organise observations, guide model construction, or make patterns of behaviour intelligible. Its usefulness must be assessed against the purpose for which it is employed.

Okasha’s Agents and Goals in Evolution (2018) is especially important for understanding these distinctions in evolutionary contexts. His analysis examines the roles played by agent-like reasoning and goal attribution in evolutionary thought, including the limits of interpreting organisms or evolutionary processes through assumptions about goals and interests.

Such interpretation requires care. Treating organisms as pursuing goals is not equivalent to treating natural selection itself as an agent with intentions. Nor is it always appropriate to assume that a biological individual possesses one coherent interest. Conflicts among genes, cells, organisms, or other biological participants can complicate an apparently unified agential description.

The question is not simply whether goal-directed language is permitted, but under what biological assumptions it is informative and when those assumptions cease to hold.

Different Strengths of Agency Attribution

Agency can also be attributed in stronger or weaker senses. Okasha’s discussion of the concept of agent in biology (2024) is useful here because it distinguishes motivations for invoking agency from the different capacities that agency language may imply.

At its broadest, agency may refer to systems whose activities can be interpreted as directed towards outcomes or goals. Stronger interpretations introduce additional capacities, such as sensitivity to information, flexible adjustment to circumstances, intelligent behaviour, rational choice, or intentional action.

These capacities should not be conflated. A system can exhibit organised goal-directed regulation without deliberating about alternatives. A response can be adaptive in an evolutionary or physiological sense without requiring conscious intention. A model can represent an organism as selecting among possible actions without establishing that it performs rational choice in the human sense.

Conversely, a definition that requires sophisticated cognition or conscious intention will exclude many biological systems that qualify under broader organisational accounts.

This is why the expression minimal agency requires particular care. It may mean agency without consciousness, agency without rational deliberation, or agency defined through comparatively elementary organisational and regulatory conditions. Those possibilities are not automatically equivalent.

An adequate comparison must therefore specify which capacities are required, which are optional, and which are not implied at all.

Organisational and Regulatory Accounts

Some contemporary approaches identify agency primarily through the organisation of living systems rather than through intelligent choice or intentional action.

Accounts of biological autonomy investigate how organised constraints and regulatory relationships contribute to the maintenance of a living system. Such approaches can ground distinctions between processes that merely occur within a system and activities organised in relation to the conditions of its continued existence (Moreno and Mossio 2015).

Other accounts explicitly develop criteria for agency involving individuality, normativity, and asymmetrical interactions between an agent and its environment (Barandiaran, Di Paolo, and Rohde 2009). Still others argue that agency is inherent in living organisms, although the meaning and explanatory consequences of that claim require independent examination (Rosslenbroich, Kümmell, and Bembé 2024).

These approaches share concerns about biological organisation and activity, but their criteria and theoretical purposes are not identical. Organisational closure, regulatory control, environmental interaction, and goal-directedness must be distinguished rather than assembled into an undifferentiated list of agency properties.

In particular, the fact that a system is regulated does not by itself settle whether the system is an agent, whether a component is independently agential, or whether agency terminology contributes anything beyond a detailed regulatory explanation.

Agency, Biological Significance, and Explanation

A further difficulty concerns the relationship between agency and biological significance.

Living systems encounter conditions that matter differently for their continued functioning and persistence. Some changes support their organisation; others threaten it. Such asymmetries can motivate accounts of biological normativity without requiring conscious judgement or externally imposed purposes.

However, recognising that an activity contributes to persistence does not settle every question about agency. It remains necessary to identify the organisation to which the activity belongs, determine the relevant conditions of persistence, and establish whether agency is being attributed to that organisation or merely to one of its participating processes.

It is also necessary to distinguish an agency claim from an explanatory claim.

An account may correctly identify an organism as an agent while adding no new dependency to the strongest available explanation of a particular phenomenon. Alternatively, an agential perspective may help connect observations across physiology, development, behaviour, and evolution without establishing a new causal mechanism or a superior explanation of any one of them.

Conceptual integration, explanatory gain, and communication advantage are therefore distinct possible contributions. None follows automatically from the use of agency terminology.

For this article, the most important methodological consequence is that competing accounts should be compared through their stated criteria, biological targets, and explanatory commitments. Agreement about the importance of organismal activity does not establish agreement about agency. Disagreement over definitions does not by itself establish a substantive biological disagreement.

The following sections examine how these distinctions operate in organism-centred evolution, theories of autonomy, developmental and process-oriented approaches, and criticisms of biological agency. Only after reconstructing those positions can the particular contribution and limitations of APS be assessed.

Agency and Evolution

Evolutionary biology provides one of the most important settings for the contemporary debate about agency. Organisms develop, behave, regulate their relations with environments, and sometimes alter the conditions affecting their survival and reproduction. These activities can influence evolutionary outcomes. The disputed question is not whether organisms are causally active, but how their activities should figure in evolutionary explanation and whether describing them as agents makes an additional explanatory difference.

Two particularly important contributions come from Denis Walsh’s organism-centred approach to evolution and Samir Okasha’s analysis of agents and goals. Both challenge overly simple accounts of biological activity, but they approach the subject from different directions.

Walsh: Organisms as Participants in Evolution

In Organisms, Agency, and Evolution (2015), Walsh develops an organism-centred perspective associated with his broader account of situated Darwinism. His central concern is the explanatory place of organisms within evolutionary theory.

Evolutionary change is commonly investigated through variation, inheritance, selection, population processes, and the environmental circumstances affecting reproductive success. Walsh’s approach asks whether explanations organised predominantly around these factors adequately recognise the activities of organisms themselves.

Organisms are not simply passive bearers of traits whose evolutionary consequences are determined independently of their activities. They behave, develop, regulate, and interact with particular environments. Their responses can affect the circumstances in which selection occurs and the developmental production of phenotypes upon which evolutionary processes depend.

The importance of this argument does not rest on rejecting natural selection or denying the explanatory achievements of population genetics. Rather, it concerns whether evolutionary explanation is complete when the organism’s situated activity is represented only as an outcome of other processes.

This makes Walsh an important contributor to the contemporary discussion of biological agency. Agency directs attention to the organism as an active participant in the production of evolutionary circumstances, rather than merely an object upon which evolutionary causes operate.

However, several questions remain distinct. Establishing that organisms participate actively in evolutionary processes does not by itself determine the criteria for agency attribution. Nor does it establish that agency constitutes a new evolutionary mechanism. Finally, the importance of organismal activity does not prove that an explicitly agential account explains a specified evolutionary outcome better than an account already incorporating behaviour, development, physiology, and ecological interaction.

Walsh’s contribution should therefore be assessed as an organism-centred challenge concerning the architecture of evolutionary explanation, not reduced to the general observation that organisms are active.

Okasha: Agents, Goals, and Evolutionary Explanation

Samir Okasha approaches the relationship between agency and evolution through a different set of questions. In Agents and Goals in Evolution (2018), he examines the role of agent-like reasoning, goal attribution, and assumptions about biological interests in evolutionary thinking.

Evolutionary biology frequently employs language associated with agents: organisms pursue resources, strategies are favoured, traits serve functions, and biological entities appear to act in ways directed towards outcomes. Some such language can be interpreted through evolutionary models without implying conscious deliberation or intention.

Yet not every use of agential language makes the same claim. Representing an organism as if it were pursuing a goal may be an effective modelling strategy. Claiming that an organism genuinely possesses agency is a different proposition. Treating natural selection itself as an agent introduces a further and potentially misleading attribution.

Okasha’s work is important because it makes these differences available for explicit examination rather than allowing them to remain hidden within familiar evolutionary terminology.

One complication concerns biological interests. It may be tempting to describe an organism as acting in its own interest, but evolutionary processes can involve conflicts among genetic elements, cells, organisms, and other biological participants. The interests represented in an evolutionary model may therefore depend on which biological entity is being considered and on the assumptions under which its behaviour is modelled.

The usefulness of an agential interpretation cannot be settled merely by observing that evolutionary outcomes are associated with fitness differences. Fitness consequences, present-tense organismal goals, and the assumptions of a goal-directed model are distinguishable.

Okasha’s analysis consequently provides an important methodological resource. It encourages researchers to specify what is being treated as an agent, what goal or interest is being attributed, and whether the attribution is ontological, heuristic, or part of a particular explanatory model.

Two Approaches, Different Questions

Walsh and Okasha should not be treated as representatives of a single agency doctrine.

Walsh’s principal contribution in this context concerns the role of situated organismal activity within evolutionary explanation. Okasha investigates the meanings, assumptions, and limits of agent and goal attribution in evolutionary reasoning.

The approaches overlap because both make the status of organisms and their activities theoretically important. Their questions nevertheless differ. An organism-centred evolutionary explanation need not depend upon the same account of goal attribution as an evolutionary model using agent-like reasoning.

Neither approach requires agency to displace variation, inheritance, natural selection, or population-level explanation. The more productive question is how organismal activities, developmental processes, and evolutionary dependencies are related in particular cases.

For example, environmentally responsive development may alter a phenotype. The resulting phenotype may affect survival or reproduction. The conditions producing that response may themselves depend upon the organism’s activity. These relationships can all matter to evolutionary explanation, but they must be established separately.

Agency attribution concerns the organisation and activity of the candidate agent. Evolutionary explanation concerns the dependencies producing the evolutionary outcome. Explanatory gain concerns whether explicitly invoking agency contributes something that the strongest relevant account does not already provide.

The contemporary significance of Walsh and Okasha lies partly in making these distinctions harder to overlook. Their contributions motivate closer examination of organismal activity and agential interpretation, without establishing in advance that agency terminology is indispensable.

Autonomy and Self-Maintenance

A second major approach to biological agency begins not with evolutionary change but with the organisation through which living systems maintain themselves.

Living organisms continually depend upon material and energetic exchanges, regulatory activities, and mutually supporting processes. Their persistence cannot be explained simply by listing their components. It requires an account of how those components and processes are organised so that the conditions necessary for continued functioning are maintained or re-established.

Theories of biological autonomy investigate this organisation directly. They provide some of the strongest contemporary alternatives to, and potential foundations for, accounts of biological agency.

Biological Autonomy and Organisational Closure

Moreno and Mossio’s Biological Autonomy (2015) develops an organisational account of living systems centred on the relationships among constraints that contribute to maintaining the organisation of which they are part.

The concept of organisational closure is important here. Biological constraints can depend upon processes that they themselves help to regulate or sustain. The resulting organisation exhibits a form of mutual dependence that distinguishes the organisation of living systems from a mere collection of causally interacting components.

This does not imply that organisms are materially closed. Living systems depend upon continuous exchanges with their environments. Organisational closure concerns the relationships through which constraints contribute to the maintenance of the system, not the absence of external material or energetic dependencies.

Autonomy theory thereby provides an account of why certain activities matter to a living system’s continued existence. Processes are not considered solely as isolated causal events; they are understood through their contributions to an organisation whose continued functioning depends upon their relationships.

This is a substantial explanatory achievement in its own right. It should not be treated merely as preliminary material awaiting reinterpretation through agency.

From Autonomy to Agency

Although autonomy and agency are closely related in some theoretical programmes, they are not interchangeable terms.

An account of autonomy may establish how a living organisation maintains itself. An account of agency may additionally address how an autonomous organisation regulates its interactions with changing circumstances, or how its activity is directed in relation to conditions bearing upon its continued existence.

The relationship between these questions is itself a subject of theoretical investigation. It should not be assumed that every autonomous system possesses every capacity associated with agency, or that every regulatory activity constitutes a separate agent.

Virenque and Mossio’s discussion of agency in relation to biological autonomy is relevant precisely because it addresses the transition from organisational conditions to forms of purposive regulation. Such approaches investigate how goal-directed activity can be understood biologically without requiring the attribution of conscious intention.

The explanatory challenge is to establish the organisational and regulatory conditions that warrant the relevant agency attribution. Merely applying the word agency to autonomous organisation does not settle that question.

Nor should purposiveness be confused with an externally imposed purpose. A living system may exhibit activities organised in relation to its own conditions of functioning without possessing a consciously represented goal.

Individuality, Interaction, and Normativity

Barandiaran, Di Paolo, and Rohde (2009) provide a particularly useful contribution by proposing criteria for defining agency through individuality, interactional asymmetry, and normativity.

These criteria address different aspects of the agency problem.

Individuality concerns the organisation that warrants treatment as a distinguishable agent. Interactional asymmetry concerns the relationship between the candidate agent and its environment, including the contribution of the agent’s organisation to shaping its interactions. Normativity concerns the conditions under which interactions can be evaluated as favourable or unfavourable relative to the organisation concerned.

The significance of this approach is that agency cannot be inferred from activity alone. The relevant individuality and the organisation of interaction must also be established.

A process may participate in maintaining an organism without constituting an independent agent. A component may contribute causally to regulation without possessing the organisational conditions required for independent agency attribution. Equally, an organism’s activities may be distributed across changing material components without that distribution undermining the organisation’s biological individuality.

These distinctions are important when considering agency in cells, multicellular organisms, physiological subsystems, and wider biological associations. Agency attribution requires an account of the candidate organisation, not merely a choice of spatial or descriptive scale.

Normativity also requires care. The fact that conditions matter differently for a living system does not imply that the system makes conscious judgements. Biological significance can be grounded in relationships between organised activity and the conditions of continued functioning.

Is Agency Inherent in Living Organisms?

Rosslenbroich and colleagues (2024) offer a more explicit argument for agency as an inherent property of living organisms.

This position has the merit of resisting the restriction of agency to sophisticated cognition, deliberation, or intentional choice. It directs attention towards capacities characteristic of living systems themselves.

However, the formulation raises questions about what it means for agency to be inherent in life. Does it identify a defining organisational feature? Does it refer to capacities exhibited by living systems under appropriate conditions? Or does it propose an explanatory principle beyond established accounts of biological organisation?

These possibilities should be distinguished. The claim that living systems possess agency in some fundamental biological sense does not automatically establish that agency is an additional causal power or that an agency-based explanation will improve every account of living activity.

A defensible account must still specify its criteria of attribution and the explanatory work expected of the concept.

What Autonomy Approaches Contribute

Theories of biological autonomy offer more than an alternative vocabulary for agency. They provide detailed accounts of organisational dependence, self-maintenance, constraint relationships, and the conditions under which biological activities contribute to continued functioning.

Accounts of agency arising from this tradition address further questions about individuality, interaction, regulation, purposiveness, and biological significance.

Their relationships should be investigated through the actual dependencies they identify. Two theories may employ different terminology while describing closely related organisational relationships. Conversely, theories using similar terms may differ substantially in their criteria of individuality or in the regulatory capacities they regard as necessary.

The resulting comparison must therefore preserve the independent explanatory achievements of autonomy theory. Agency should not be credited with organisational dependencies already established by the strongest autonomy account unless it demonstrably contributes an additional distinction relevant to the explanatory target.

Development, Plasticity and Purposiveness

A third group of approaches places emphasis on the activities through which organisms develop, respond to changing circumstances, and participate in the production of phenotypes.

These approaches are important to the contemporary agency debate because they challenge overly rigid separations between organism and environment, inherited resources and developmental outcomes, and biological organisation and evolutionary change.

Nevertheless, developmental responsiveness, phenotypic plasticity, and purposiveness must not be treated as interchangeable with agency.

Development as Organism–Environment Interaction

Development is not simply the execution of an internally specified programme. Developmental outcomes depend upon interactions among inherited resources, cellular and physiological processes, environmental conditions, and the organism’s developmental history.

Sultan’s Organism and Environment (2015) develops the importance of environmentally responsive development and the ecological circumstances in which phenotypes are produced.

Phenotypic plasticity describes the capacity of a genotype, or developing organism, to produce different phenotypic outcomes under different conditions. Such responsiveness can be crucial to biological functioning and can have consequences for ecological performance and evolution.

However, a plastic response need not be an act of independent agency. It may arise through well-characterised developmental and regulatory processes whose causal dependencies can be explained without treating the responding subsystem as an agent.

The relevant distinction is between the existence of a response and the organisation to which agency might be attributed.

A plant responding developmentally to altered light, water availability, or mechanical conditions illustrates the issue. The developmental change may be biologically significant and may contribute to persistence. Yet it remains necessary to determine whether agency is being attributed to the plant as an organised living system, to a particular regulatory subsystem, or merely to the developmental process itself.

Those attributions are not equivalent.

Plasticity and Evolutionary Consequence

Developmental plasticity can influence evolutionary outcomes in several ways. It can affect the phenotypes exposed to selection, alter relationships between organisms and environments, and influence the developmental production of variation.

Evolutionary developmental biology investigates these relationships, including how developmental systems shape the possibilities and trajectories of evolutionary change.

Nadolski and Moczek (2023) explicitly examine the promises and challenges of an agency perspective within evolutionary developmental biology. Their contribution is relevant because it addresses the potential explanatory role of agency in a field already concerned with development as an active and consequential process.

However, three claims must be distinguished.

First, a developmental activity may be part of the biological agency of an organism. Second, that activity may affect conditions relevant to evolutionary change. Third, explicitly analysing it as agency may improve the explanation of a specified evolutionary outcome.

None of these claims follows automatically from the preceding one.

A developmental response can be biologically consequential without agency terminology adding anything to its explanation. Similarly, an organism’s activity may be genuinely agential while its evolutionary effects are adequately explained through developmental mechanisms, phenotypic variation, inheritance, selection, and ecological circumstances.

The explanatory contribution of an agency perspective must therefore be established through the dependencies relevant to the evolutionary question, rather than inferred from the importance of development.

Purposiveness Without Conscious Intention

Developmental and regulatory activities are frequently described in purposive terms. Organisms repair damage, restore physiological conditions, adjust growth, and regulate their activities in ways that contribute to continued functioning.

Such descriptions need not imply conscious intention. Biological systems can exhibit organised regulation directed towards maintaining or restoring conditions necessary for their persistence without deliberating about those conditions.

Nevertheless, purposiveness presents a conceptual challenge. If every process that contributes to a biological outcome is described as purposive, the distinction between goal-directed organisation and ordinary causal contribution becomes unclear.

An adequate account should therefore identify the organisation concerned, the conditions relative to which an outcome matters, and the regulatory dependencies through which activity is organised.

A process that contributes to persistence is not necessarily an independently purposive agent. The significance of the process may derive from its participation in a wider organisation.

Equally, a purposive description should not be taken as evidence that a biological system possesses conscious goals, intentions, or rational decision-making capacities.

The appropriate explanatory vocabulary depends upon the phenomenon being investigated and the capacities that can be established.

Processual Organisation and Developmental Continuity

Process-oriented philosophy of biology offers a further perspective on development and living continuity.

Nicholson and Dupré (2018) emphasise that living systems persist through ongoing processes of material exchange, regulation, development, and transformation. Biological individuals need not maintain a fixed material composition in order to exhibit continuity.

This perspective is relevant to agency because the organisation attributed to an agent may itself be dynamic. The continued existence of a living individual can depend upon changing material components and relationships rather than the persistence of an unchanging structure.

Yet processuality does not establish agency.

A process may be temporally extended, dynamically organised, and causally significant without constituting an agent. The fact that biological individuality is maintained through change does not settle which organisation warrants agency attribution or which activities count as agential.

Process-oriented approaches therefore contribute an important understanding of biological continuity, but their relationship to agency must be established rather than assumed.

Developmental Activity and the Limits of Agency Attribution

Developmental plasticity, evolutionary developmental biology, purposive regulation, and process-oriented accounts collectively reinforce the importance of organised biological activity.

They also illustrate why a general emphasis on activity cannot serve as a sufficient definition of agency.

Different approaches investigate different questions: how phenotypes are produced, how developmental systems respond to environmental circumstances, how regulatory activities maintain functioning, how development affects evolution, and how biological individuals persist through change.

Agency may be relevant to some of these questions. It does not follow that all require an agential explanation.

The most useful comparison begins by establishing what each approach already explains, identifying the organisation and activity under investigation, and asking whether agency contributes a further explanatory distinction.

This leaves open several legitimate outcomes. Agency may prove important to a particular explanatory target. It may provide a useful complementary perspective. It may amount to an equivalent redescription. Or it may be unnecessary.

The value of developmental and process-oriented research should not depend upon which of these outcomes is reached.

The Case Against Biological Agency

The renewed interest in biological agency has not gone unchallenged. Critics question whether the concept identifies a distinctive biological phenomenon, whether it adds anything to established explanatory practices, and whether the diversity of agency definitions permits a coherent research programme.

These objections are important because the biological reality of organismal activity is not itself in dispute. Organisms regulate, develop, behave, maintain themselves, and interact with environments. The question is whether describing such activities as agency establishes something that established accounts of physiology, development, evolution, regulation, and biological organisation do not already explain.

A particularly important contribution to this debate is DiFrisco and Gawne’s Biological Agency: A Concept Without a Research Program (2025). Their criticism requires serious attention because it concerns not merely the acceptability of agency terminology, but the scientific work that the concept is expected to perform.

The Research-Programme Challenge

DiFrisco and Gawne challenge the case for biological agency as a productive scientific concept. Their criticism directs attention to the diversity of meanings assigned to agency and to the difficulty of identifying a sufficiently coherent body of research organised around a common explanatory problem.

The issue is not settled by collecting examples of organisms behaving purposefully, responding flexibly, or maintaining themselves. Such examples may demonstrate that living systems possess important capacities, but they do not necessarily show that agency is the concept through which those capacities are most effectively investigated.

A concept can be philosophically defensible without organising a distinctive empirical research programme. It can also provide an illuminating interpretation of known phenomena without identifying additional explanatory dependencies.

The challenge is therefore to specify what biological agency contributes beyond the established concepts already used to investigate the relevant phenomena.

Does agency identify a distinctive organisational condition? Does it support new explanatory distinctions? Does it generate research questions that would otherwise be neglected? Does it connect findings across biological domains in a way that improves understanding? Or does it redescribe established mechanisms and processes without changing their explanation?

These questions are related, but they require different forms of evidence.

Conceptual Diversity and Explanatory Fragmentation

One difficulty is that agency is attributed according to different criteria.

Some accounts emphasise goal-directed behaviour. Others emphasise organisational autonomy, self-maintenance, interactional asymmetry, regulatory control, or the capacity to act in relation to biological interests. Stronger interpretations may require cognition, intelligence, rational choice, or intention.

These differences can produce different classifications of biological systems. A bacterium may qualify as an agent under a minimal organisational criterion while failing a criterion requiring representation or rational decision-making. A physiological subsystem may be described as controlling a process without satisfying the conditions for independent agency attribution.

Conceptual plurality is not necessarily a defect. Scientific concepts often acquire different specialised meanings. However, plurality becomes problematic when conclusions established under one definition are transferred to another without justification.

Evidence that a system regulates its internal conditions does not establish that it possesses intentions. Evidence that organismal activity affects evolution does not establish that agency constitutes an additional evolutionary mechanism. Evidence that agency terminology is useful in a model does not establish that agency is a fundamental property of life.

A productive agency research programme must therefore distinguish genuine theoretical disagreements from differences of terminology and explanatory purpose.

Redescription and the Risk of Explanatory Inflation

A second objection concerns explanatory redundancy.

Suppose a biological phenomenon is already explained through a well-established account of regulatory interactions, signalling pathways, physiological constraints, or evolutionary dependencies. Describing the same phenomenon as an expression of agency may be accurate under a particular definition, but accuracy alone does not demonstrate additional explanatory value.

For example, a regulatory response may maintain conditions necessary for an organism’s continued functioning. An agency interpretation may describe the response as viability-oriented activity. Yet if the established regulatory explanation already specifies the relevant conditions, interactions, dependencies, and outcomes, the agency interpretation may contribute no additional explanatory dependency.

This is not evidence that the organism lacks agency. It is evidence that agency terminology may be unnecessary for that particular explanatory task.

The distinction is crucial. A concept may be applicable without being indispensable. An interpretation may be illuminating without improving the strongest available explanation. A framework may organise familiar findings without discovering a new mechanism.

The strongest criticism of biological agency therefore cannot be answered simply by demonstrating that living systems are active, goal-directed in some biological sense, or organised around their continued functioning.

It must be answered by showing what follows scientifically from treating them as agents.

Does Agency Generate a Distinctive Research Programme?

A research programme need not depend upon discovering an entirely new causal mechanism. It may contribute by establishing previously unrecognised dependencies, refining experimental distinctions, generating discriminating predictions, or connecting findings that had previously been investigated separately.

However, these contributions must be demonstrated rather than assumed.

A proposed agency framework should identify the explanatory targets it addresses, the conditions under which agency attribution is warranted, and the consequences of using its concepts. It should also identify the established explanations against which its contribution is being assessed.

Without such controls, the apparent success of an agency interpretation can result from choosing an artificially weak comparator. An agency account may appear informative when compared with a simplified stimulus–response description, yet provide no additional insight when compared with a detailed mechanistic or organisational explanation of the same phenomenon.

The relevant standard is therefore not whether agency improves upon a deliberately impoverished description. It is whether agency makes a difference relative to the strongest established account of the specified explanatory target.

Negative outcomes must remain possible. A research programme that interprets every result as confirmation of agency cannot establish the distinctive explanatory contribution of agency.

What the Criticism Does and Does Not Establish

The research-programme challenge should not be interpreted as proving that biological agency is unreal, that organisms are passive, or that purposive descriptions are scientifically illegitimate.

Those conclusions do not follow merely from the absence of demonstrated explanatory gain.

We should distinguish between agency as a proposed operationally identifiable biological phenomenon and agency as a demonstrated source of explanatory gain. The first concerns whether specified biological activities and organisational relationships provide defensible empirical criteria for agency attribution; the second concerns whether invoking agency improves an explanation beyond what the strongest relevant existing account already establishes. The six biosignatures proposed in Agency as the Defining Activity of Life offer possible operational indicators for investigating the first question, but their empirical tractability does not by itself validate them as distinctive agency criteria or establish the second. Both questions remain open to appropriately controlled investigation.

A biological system might genuinely satisfy a defensible criterion of agency while the concept remains redundant for many specific explanations. Conversely, an agential modelling strategy might be useful without establishing the stronger ontological claim that the modelled system possesses agency in every relevant sense.

The criticism also does not establish that conceptual integration or improved communication is scientifically worthless. Such contributions may be valuable, particularly where different biological disciplines investigate related organisational dependencies using different vocabularies.

Nevertheless, conceptual integration and communication must be assessed on their own terms. They cannot be presented as demonstrated explanatory gain simply because they make a framework attractive or easier to describe.

DiFrisco and Gawne’s challenge is therefore best treated as a continuing demand for explanatory and research accountability. It asks proponents of biological agency to establish what the concept contributes, to identify the conditions under which it is useful, and to recognise circumstances in which established biological explanations are already sufficient.

This challenge applies to APS as well as to other agency approaches. A definition of biological agency does not exempt the framework employing it from comparative assessment.

What Has Biological Agency Actually Explained?

The contemporary agency debate raises an important distinction between recognising a biological phenomenon and explaining it.

Organisms are active. They regulate internal conditions, respond to environments, develop, maintain themselves, and contribute to ecological and evolutionary processes. These activities can be described in agency-related terms, and some may satisfy defensible criteria of biological agency.

Yet the explanatory question remains: what does agency contribute to understanding the dependencies through which those activities occur?

An adequate assessment must distinguish several possible achievements.

Four Different Kinds of Contribution

First, agency may provide an ontological clarification. It may establish why a particular biological organisation warrants treatment as an agent, which organisation bears that attribution, and why agency does not require conscious intention or rational deliberation.

Second, agency may provide a heuristic or modelling contribution. Representing a biological system in terms of goals, interests, or strategies may guide investigation or simplify a model, even when the representation does not establish a stronger ontological claim.

Third, agency may provide conceptual integration. It may help relate findings from physiology, development, behaviour, ecology, and evolution by making shared organisational questions more explicit.

Fourth, agency may provide explanatory gain. It may identify a previously neglected dependency, establish a distinction that changes the explanation of a phenomenon, or improve explanatory adequacy relative to the strongest relevant comparator.

These contributions must not be conflated.

Ontological clarification does not automatically establish explanatory gain. A useful model does not automatically establish ontological agency. Conceptual integration does not automatically demonstrate improved scientific communication. And a new terminology does not necessarily identify a new biological dependency.

The possibility that agency makes different contributions to different explanatory tasks should be treated as a feature of the investigation rather than as an inconvenience to be eliminated.

Explanatory Targets and Strongest Comparators

The explanatory contribution of agency cannot be assessed in the abstract.

A comparison must begin with a specified explanandum: the phenomenon or outcome to be explained.

For a physiological response, the target may be the restoration of a regulated condition following a disturbance. For bacterial chemotaxis, it may be the relationship between chemical sensing, intracellular signalling, motor regulation, and movement. For a developmental response, it may be the production of an environmentally induced phenotype. For an evolutionary case, it may be the dependencies connecting variation, inheritance, organismal activity, and differential reproductive outcomes.

The strongest relevant comparator will differ accordingly.

A physiological target may require comparison with a detailed regulatory or mechanistic explanation. A question about biological autonomy may require comparison with organisational closure and constraint-based accounts. A developmental target may require comparison with established developmental mechanisms and reaction norms. An evolutionary target may require comparison with the relevant evolutionary and ecological dependencies.

Agency should not receive credit for identifying relationships that the comparator already establishes.

Nor should an agency framework be required to outperform every established biological explanation in every respect. The relevant question is whether it makes a demonstrable difference to the particular explanatory task.

A Controlled Comparison: Yeast Osmotic Regulation

The APS Agency Conceptual Utility programme examined osmotic recovery in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, using the high-osmolarity glycerol response as a physiological reference case.

The question was whether describing the response through viability-oriented agency identified explanatory dependencies not already adequately represented by the strongest relevant regulatory account.

The comparison considered the relationships among osmotic disturbance, detection and signalling, regulatory responses, physiological adjustment, and recovery.

The resulting judgement was equivalent redescription.

The agency interpretation was compatible with the biological organisation involved, but the tested dependencies were already covered by the strongest comparator. No additional explanatory dependency was established through the agency vocabulary.

This result did not show that the yeast lacked agency under the APS criterion. It showed that agency analysis had not demonstrated explanatory gain for the specified physiological target.

The distinction between legitimate attribution and explanatory contribution was therefore preserved.

Bacterial Chemotaxis and a Negative Control

The programme subsequently examined Escherichia coli chemotaxis as a second biological case.

Chemotaxis involves the relationship between environmental chemical conditions, sensory and signalling processes, motor regulation, and changes in bacterial movement.

Such activity is readily described in goal-directed language. Bacteria move in ways that can favour access to resources or avoidance of unfavourable conditions, and their responses can be analysed in relation to biological functioning.

However, an agential interpretation must still be compared with the established account of chemotactic regulation.

For the tested target, the outcome was again equivalent redescription. The agency account did not establish a dependency absent from the strongest comparator.

A membrane ion-transport case served as a negative control. For its local explanatory target, agency terminology was classified as dispensable.

This outcome did not establish that ion transport is biologically unimportant or unrelated to the agency of the organism in which it occurs. It established that independent agency attribution or agency terminology was unnecessary for the explanatory task being tested.

Together, the cases demonstrate that agency attribution and explanatory usefulness must be assessed separately.

What the Negative Findings Mean

The yeast and chemotaxis comparisons did not demonstrate a distinctive explanatory advantage for APS agency terminology. The ion-transport control showed that agency can be unnecessary for a local target even where the process contributes to living organisation.

These findings are important precisely because they are admissible outcomes of a controlled comparison.

They do not justify the universal conclusion that agency is explanatorily redundant. Three selected cases cannot establish that agency makes no difference anywhere in biology.

Nor do they justify claiming that agency has demonstrated explanatory gain through cross-disciplinary integration. That remains a separate possibility requiring its own evidence.

The supported conclusion is narrower: in the tested cases, agency did not improve the explanation relative to the specified strongest comparators.

This also limits the interpretation of the framework’s conceptual contribution. APS may offer a coherent vocabulary for relating viability, biological activity, persistence, development, and evolution. Whether that vocabulary improves understanding or communication across biological domains remains to be established independently.

Cross-Disciplinary Integration as a Research Question

One possible contribution of biological agency lies in the integration of biological knowledge.

Physiologists investigate regulatory dependencies. Developmental biologists investigate the production and transformation of phenotypes. Ecologists investigate organism–environment relationships. Evolutionary biologists investigate variation, inheritance, selection, and historical transformation.

These fields often describe related biological activities using different explanatory vocabularies.

An agency framework may help identify relationships among their questions, particularly where the maintenance of living organisation, environmental responsiveness, and continuity through change are relevant across domains.

Such integration could be scientifically valuable even if it does not identify a new mechanism or improve a particular local explanation.

However, its value cannot be established merely by asserting that different fields are connected. Biology already contains powerful cross-disciplinary concepts and frameworks, including regulatory, mechanistic, organisational, developmental, and evolutionary approaches.

A proposed integrative framework must therefore be compared with these existing resources.

The relevant questions include whether it clarifies dependencies that otherwise remain obscure, reduces conceptual ambiguity, supports the transfer of explanatory distinctions between domains, or enables researchers and readers to understand relationships more accurately.

Improved communication is also an empirical claim. It would require evidence that the framework assists understanding relative to an appropriate comparator, rather than simply providing terminology its proponents find convenient.

Conceptual coherence may justify further investigation, but it does not by itself demonstrate communicative or explanatory advantage.

What Would Count as Explanatory Gain?

A stronger case for biological agency would require a specified explanatory target for which explicit agency analysis makes a difference that survives comparison with the strongest available alternative.

Several kinds of outcome could be relevant.

Agency might identify an organisational dependency omitted from the comparator. It might establish why the attribution of agency belongs to one biological organisation rather than another, where that distinction changes the explanation. It might reveal a connection among regulatory, developmental, ecological, or evolutionary dependencies that is not adequately captured by existing accounts.

Alternatively, agency might provide a complementary representation without improving the explanation of the target. It might offer equivalent redescription. It might prove unnecessary or misleading.

The assessment must allow all these outcomes.

A particularly important control is that agency must not be credited with explanatory gain merely because it restates established biological facts in a common vocabulary. The difference must concern the explanation itself, not simply its verbal presentation.

Likewise, the discovery of a genuine biological dependency does not establish that agency was necessary to discover or explain it. The dependency must be compared with what the strongest established account already provides.

The Present State of the Evidence

The contemporary agency literature contains substantial conceptual work on organismal activity, autonomy, purposiveness, biological individuality, and the explanatory roles of goal-directed interpretation.

These contributions should not be dismissed simply because a unified agency research programme remains contested.

Equally, their existence does not establish that biological agency provides a single superior explanatory framework for biology.

The completed APS comparisons support a deliberately limited conclusion. Agency can be attributed coherently under a specified criterion, but its use has not demonstrated additional explanatory dependencies in the tested physiological and behavioural cases. The possible benefits of cross-disciplinary integration and communication remain research questions rather than established results.

This assessment is consistent with taking the biological agency debate seriously. It recognises the significance of the questions raised by agency approaches while preserving the independence of established biological explanations.

The next question is therefore not whether agency should be accepted or rejected as a universal explanatory principle. It is where particular agency concepts make demonstrable contributions, where they provide useful complementary interpretations, and where established biological terminology remains sufficient.

That question provides the appropriate basis for assessing APS alongside the other contemporary approaches considered in this article.

Where the APS Framework Fits

The contemporary debate about biological agency raises several different questions. What makes a biological organisation an agent? How is agency related to autonomy, regulation, development, and evolution? When does agency terminology contribute to an explanation? And can a common conceptual framework help connect biological knowledge across otherwise separate disciplines?

The Agency–Process–Scale (APS) framework addresses these questions through a particular account of living organisation. It does not treat agency as an additional biological force, a substitute for established mechanisms, or an explanatory principle that must be invoked whenever an organism is active.

APS begins with the organisation of living systems and the activities through which that organisation maintains the conditions necessary for its continued existence.

The APS Account of Life and Agency

APS defines life as viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation.

This formulation identifies living systems through the organisation of materially realised dependencies that sustain the conditions of their continued functioning. Living systems are materially open: they depend upon exchanges with their environments. Their organisation nevertheless exhibits relationships through which activities and constraints contribute to maintaining or re-establishing the conditions of continued existence.

Within this account, biological agency is viability-oriented organisational activity.

Agency therefore refers to what living organisation does. It is not an additional property imposed upon an otherwise passive biological system, nor does it require the possession of conscious intentions, rational deliberation, or sophisticated cognition.

The definition is deliberately organisational. It directs attention to the activities through which living systems maintain, regulate, and reorganise themselves in relation to conditions bearing upon their persistence.

However, this definition does not imply that every process occurring within an organism is independently agential. A physiological component may contribute to the agency of a wider living organisation without itself satisfying the conditions for independent agency attribution.

Nor does the definition imply that agency terminology is required to explain every instance of biological regulation.

The distinction between identifying agency and demonstrating its explanatory contribution remains fundamental.

Agency, Process, and Scale

APS analyses living organisation through three complementary perspectives: Agency, Process, and Scale.

Agency concerns viability-oriented organisational activity: what living systems do in maintaining or re-establishing the conditions of their continued functioning.

Process concerns the activities and transformations through which biological organisation persists despite material and organisational change.

Scale concerns the spatial and temporal extents across which the relevant biological organisation and its dependencies are realised.

These are not three independent components of life. They are analytic projections of one materially realised organisation.

Consequently, APS does not propose that Agency, Process, and Scale operate as separate causal powers or occupy successive levels of a biological hierarchy. Nor does it assume that every biological explanation must explicitly invoke all three.

The distinction is intended to prevent different explanatory questions from being conflated.

A question about whether an organisation warrants agency attribution differs from a question about how its continuity is maintained. Both differ from a question about the spatial or temporal extent across which the relevant dependencies operate.

These questions can nevertheless concern the same biological organisation.

Points of Convergence

APS shares important commitments with several contemporary approaches.

With organism-centred evolutionary theory, it recognises that organisms participate actively in the circumstances of their existence and evolution.

With biological autonomy theory, it emphasises the organisational dependencies through which living systems maintain themselves.

With developmental and ecological approaches, it recognises that biological functioning depends upon continuing organism–environment relationships.

With process-oriented approaches, it recognises that biological persistence involves continuity through change rather than the preservation of an unchanging material structure.

With minimal accounts of agency, it rejects the requirement that biological agency must involve conscious intention or rational choice.

These convergences are substantial, but they do not establish that the approaches are theoretically identical.

Organism-centred evolutionary theory, organisational autonomy, developmental plasticity, and process philosophy have different explanatory targets. They also possess independent explanatory resources that cannot simply be absorbed into APS by adopting a common vocabulary.

APS must therefore be compared with each approach at the level of the dependencies it identifies and the explanatory questions it addresses.

What APS Distinguishes

APS makes several distinctions explicit.

First, it separates the definition of biological agency from the explanatory usefulness of agency attribution.

A system may satisfy the APS criterion for biological agency while a particular phenomenon is already adequately explained through established physiological, developmental, organisational, or evolutionary accounts.

Second, it distinguishes participation in agency from independent agency attribution.

A component may contribute to the functioning and persistence of a living organisation without thereby constituting a separate agent.

Third, it distinguishes organised persistence from the continued existence of fixed material components.

Biological continuity may depend upon ongoing material exchange, regulation, development, and transformation.

Fourth, it distinguishes biological significance from conscious evaluation.

Conditions can matter differently for the continued functioning of a living system without the system consciously representing or judging those conditions.

Finally, APS distinguishes conceptual integration from explanatory gain.

A framework may help relate biological questions across disciplines without establishing a new causal dependency or improving a particular local explanation.

These distinctions constitute the framework’s proposed conceptual organisation. Their formulation does not establish that they are unique to APS. Nor does it demonstrate that APS provides a superior explanation relative to the strongest existing alternatives.

Their scientific contribution must be assessed through comparative investigation.

The Limits of the Present Contribution

The completed APS Agency Conceptual Utility comparisons provide an important constraint on claims made for the framework.

In the tested yeast osmotic-regulation and bacterial chemotaxis cases, agency analysis produced equivalent redescription rather than demonstrated explanatory gain. In the membrane ion-transport control, agency terminology was dispensable for the specified local explanatory target.

These findings do not invalidate the APS definition of biological agency. They do, however, prevent the framework from claiming that its agency vocabulary has already demonstrated additional explanatory dependencies in those cases.

APS also has not established that its conceptual organisation is uniquely capable of integrating biological disciplines. Organisational biology, mechanistic explanation, systems biology, developmental approaches, and evolutionary theory already provide substantial integrative resources.

The relevant comparison is therefore not between APS and a fragmented biology lacking any shared explanatory concepts. It is between APS and the strongest existing approaches to the same integrative tasks.

The framework’s present contribution is best understood as a specified account of biological organisation accompanied by methodological controls for agency attribution and explanatory comparison.

Whether that account produces additional explanatory, integrative, or communicative benefits remains a question for research.

What Remains Unresolved?

The contemporary biological agency debate has clarified the importance of organismal activity, autonomy, regulation, purposiveness, and biological individuality. It has also revealed substantial differences in the meanings and explanatory roles assigned to agency.

Several questions remain open.

When Does Agency Attribution Make an Explanatory Difference?

The first question concerns explanatory gain.

A defensible definition of agency does not establish that using the concept improves an explanation. The completed APS comparisons illustrate this distinction through cases in which agency terminology provided equivalent redescription or was unnecessary for the specified target.

Further investigation must therefore identify cases in which agency analysis might establish a dependency or explanatory distinction absent from the strongest relevant comparator.

Such cases cannot be selected merely because they appear especially amenable to agential interpretation.

The comparison must begin with a clearly specified explanatory target, an independently reconstructed comparator, and admissible outcomes that include equivalent redescription, explanatory redundancy, and failure.

A positive result would require demonstrating what changes in the explanation when agency is explicitly introduced.

How Should Biological Agents Be Individuated?

A second question concerns biological individuality.

Living organisation can be distributed across interacting components, maintained through material turnover, and embedded within wider biological relationships.

It is therefore necessary to distinguish the organisation that warrants agency attribution from the components and processes participating in that organisation.

Neither spatial extent nor causal importance alone determines the relevant agent.

This question becomes especially important where biological organisations overlap, where regulatory activities are distributed, or where the boundaries of persistence change through development and ecological interaction.

An adequate account must identify the materially realised organisation that supports the attribution rather than assuming that every identifiable subsystem is independently agential.

A third question concerns the relationship between present-tense biological activity and evolutionary transformation.

Organisms regulate, develop, behave, and modify environments. These activities can affect the circumstances relevant to inheritance, variation, selection, and evolutionary outcomes.

Yet agency should not be treated as an additional evolutionary mechanism merely because organismal activity contributes to evolution.

The relevant dependencies must be established for each evolutionary case.

The explanatory challenge is to show how particular activities contribute to evolutionary outcomes and whether explicit agency analysis improves upon the strongest existing evolutionary explanation.

This requires retaining the distinction between an organism’s continued functioning, its reproductive success, and the historical persistence of biological organisation across generations.

Can Agency Improve Cross-Disciplinary Integration?

A fourth question concerns conceptual integration.

Biology investigates related forms of organisation through different disciplinary approaches. Physiology addresses regulatory functioning. Developmental biology investigates phenotypic production and transformation. Ecology investigates organism–environment relationships. Evolutionary biology addresses variation, inheritance, selection, and historical change.

APS proposes that the relationships among Agency, Process, and Scale can help make certain dependencies connecting these domains more explicit.

This is a potentially important contribution, but its value remains to be demonstrated.

A useful test would select a biological problem requiring explanations from more than one domain and compare the resulting account with the strongest established integrative alternatives.

The comparison should determine whether APS clarifies dependencies that were previously obscured, makes distinctions that would otherwise be missed, or improves the coherence and accuracy of the resulting explanation.

Merely describing different domains using common terminology would not be sufficient.

The strongest comparator must already incorporate the relevant knowledge from those domains. Otherwise, the apparent advantage of APS might result from comparing an integrated account with an artificially fragmented alternative.

Does Conceptual Integration Improve Communication?

A fifth question concerns scientific understanding and communication.

A framework that makes biological relationships easier to understand could make a worthwhile contribution even where it does not establish a new mechanism or improve a local causal explanation.

However, improved communication cannot be inferred from conceptual elegance or the preferences of a framework’s proponents.

It requires assessment against appropriate alternatives.

Relevant outcomes might include readers’ ability to identify causal and organisational dependencies, distinguish related biological concepts, transfer understanding between domains, or explain unfamiliar cases accurately.

These outcomes should be distinguished from simple familiarity with APS terminology.

The appropriate test is whether the framework improves understanding of the biology, not merely whether readers can reproduce its vocabulary.

At present, a distinctive APS communication advantage has not been demonstrated. That possibility remains open, but it must be treated as a research hypothesis rather than an established achievement.

What Would Constitute a Successful Agency Research Programme?

The final question returns to the challenge raised by DiFrisco and Gawne.

A successful research programme centred on biological agency must establish more than the recurrence of agency language across different biological fields.

It should identify coherent explanatory targets, specify criteria for agency attribution, reconstruct established alternatives fairly, and demonstrate the contribution made by agency where such a contribution is claimed.

The contribution need not always consist of a novel mechanism. It may concern a previously neglected organisational dependency, a better-supported distinction among biological individuals, a productive connection between explanatory domains, or an empirically demonstrated improvement in understanding.

But the nature of the contribution must be stated precisely.

A research programme should also identify the conditions under which agency analysis is unnecessary, misleading, or less effective than an established alternative.

APS accepts these requirements as constraints upon its own development.

Its future contribution will depend not on the breadth of biological phenomena that can be described using Agency, Process, and Scale, but on whether those distinctions demonstrably improve the investigation, explanation, integration, or communication of biological knowledge.

Conclusion

The renewed interest in biological agency reflects a significant reconsideration of the explanatory importance of living activity.

Organism-centred evolutionary approaches, theories of biological autonomy, developmental plasticity, evolutionary developmental biology, and process-oriented accounts have all contributed to this discussion. They have done so through different concepts, explanatory targets, and theoretical commitments.

Their shared attention to organismal activity does not establish a unified theory of agency.

Nor does the legitimate attribution of agency establish that agency terminology provides a superior explanation.

The contemporary debate is therefore best understood as a plural field of related investigations whose contributions must be assessed independently.

APS enters this debate with a particular account of life as viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation and biological agency as viability-oriented organisational activity. Agency, Process, and Scale provide complementary analytic perspectives on that organisation rather than additional causal powers or separate biological levels.

This framework makes explicit distinctions among agency attribution, organised persistence, biological significance, explanatory target, and explanatory gain.

Its strongest present contribution is the formulation and disciplined application of these distinctions, not a demonstrated explanatory superiority over established biological approaches.

A central present contribution of APS is its integrated explanatory architecture, which makes explicit and relates proposed organisational dependencies across biological domains through a disciplined comparative methodology. Within this architecture, biological agency provides an organising explanatory connection between living organisation, biological evaluation, significance and cognition. It helps articulate how cognition can be continuous with life without being identical with life or agency, while leaving the relevant biological dependencies open to case-specific investigation. More broadly, APS provides a coherent, interconnected resource for exploring relationships among biological processes, clarifying explanatory questions and supporting communication across disciplinary boundaries. These are substantive features of the framework, distinct from claims of comparative explanatory superiority. Whether APS provides greater explanatory insight, more effective conceptual integration or improved communicative utility than the strongest existing alternatives remains to be demonstrated through appropriate, target-matched comparison.

The completed comparative investigations have produced negative and equivalent-redescription outcomes. These results place genuine limits on what can presently be claimed for APS, while preserving the possibility of further contributions in other explanatory contexts.

At its current stage of investigation, biological agency remains a defensible candidate for operational identification. However, APS has not yet demonstrated that invoking agency provides additional explanatory insight, distinctive conceptual value, improved integration across biological domains, or clearer scientific communication beyond what established biological frameworks already provide. Research on niche construction, developmental plasticity and evolutionary feedback identifies empirically tractable contexts in which a distinctive contribution from agency could be investigated, but such a contribution must be established independently of the explanatory achievements of those existing research programmes.

The possibility that APS improves cross-disciplinary integration or scientific communication is especially worth investigating. Such benefits could be important even without a new causal mechanism, but they must be established against the strongest relevant alternatives.

The central task for biological agency research is consequently not to secure universal acceptance of agency terminology. It is to determine when agency identifies a scientifically important feature of living organisation, when it contributes to explanation, when it assists integration or communication, and when existing biological concepts already do the necessary work.

A productive account of biological agency must remain answerable to all four possibilities.