Agency is often associated with intelligence, planning, problem-solving, or cognitive sophistication. In APS, however, biological agency does not require intelligence.
Agency refers to viability-oriented activity through which living systems contribute to maintaining or re-establishing conditions compatible with their continued organisation. Such activity can occur without cognition, planning, or conscious intention.
Many forms of biological agency therefore do not require intelligence. Cells regulate internal conditions, tissues coordinate repair, organisms maintain physiological stability, and developmental systems respond to changing conditions without requiring the forms of cognition, learning, or symbolic representation ordinarily associated with intelligence.
Intelligence can expand the ways in which some living systems respond to conditions relevant to their viability. Within APS, it can therefore be investigated as a specialised form of viability-relevant activity without making intelligence a defining requirement of biological agency.
This distinction does not require the stronger claim that intelligence is simply derived from agency or that agency alone explains the evolution or organisation of intelligence. Those questions require their own biological explanations.
APS Principle: Biological agency does not require intelligence. Agency concerns viability-oriented activity of living organisation; intelligence is one possible way in which such activity may be organised in some living systems.