Many biological theories seek to identify agency with a privileged biological component or mechanism. Agency is variously attributed to genes, molecular networks, nervous systems, brains, cognitive processes, or behavioural mechanisms. Such processes may contribute importantly to living activity, but identifying one of them does not by itself establish where biological agency resides.
In APS, biological agency is viability-oriented organisational activity. Agency therefore concerns what a living system does in maintaining and re-establishing the conditions of its persistence. It should not be identified automatically with a particular component, mechanism, or explanatory domain.
The organisation through which agency is realised may involve materially related molecular, cellular, physiological, behavioural, or organism–environment processes. Which of these relations must be included in an explanation depends on the explanandum and on which materially realised dependencies make an explanatory difference. A local explanation may sometimes be sufficient; in other cases, a wider spatial or temporal extent may be required.
This does not mean that every participating process is itself an agent, or that agency is distributed equally throughout biological organisation. Nor does it mean that agency must always be explained across multiple scales. Scale is the analytic projection concerned with where persistence is organised across spatial and temporal extents; it does not itself integrate or coordinate the activity through which agency is realised.
The organism can therefore be investigated as a viability-oriented organisation whose activity depends on materially implemented relations among its processes, constraints, and environmental conditions. The spatial and temporal extent required to explain that agency must be established from the organisation relevant to the particular biological target.
Key Point. Biological agency is viability-oriented organisational activity. It should not be identified automatically with a particular component, mechanism, or explanatory domain. The spatial and temporal extent required to explain agency must be established from the materially realised organisation relevant to the explanandum.