Organismic agency for desert after a very productive lunch with my fellow @PTPBio editors. #ISHPSSB19
@PTPBio Hugh Desmond: agential explanation – valid? indispensable? or just a far-fetched metaphor? #ISHPSSB19
Denis Walsh: agency – future-determining, teleological, and normative. #ISHPSSB19
Denis Walsh: “an agent is a purposive system embedded in a ‘landscape’ of affordances.” #ISHPSSB19
Denis Walsh: agency needed for any substantive theory of the organism based on closure, autonomy, and coupling. #ISHPSSB19
Denis Walsh: agency manifests itself in organismic contributions to adaptive evolution (plasticity, niche construction etc) #ISHPSSB19
Denis Walsh: causal explanations capture counterfactual dependencies of effects on causes; teleological explanations capture counterfactual dependencies of means on the goals to achieve them. #ISHPSSB19
Tim Lewens: agential self-organisation and selection for adaptation/adaptedness: a middle way. #ISHPSSB19
Tim Lewens: population-level factors (e.g. population size) clearly affect adaptive evolution in addition to the behaviour of individual agents. #ISHPSSB19
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