Biological Agency Without Levels

Abstract

We discuss two challenges facing any attempt to integrate the concepts of levels of organization with biological agency. These are: (i) the mapping of agency on levels of organization is not straightforward. Agency can only be mapped on levels if they contain mediating units which are more proximate to entities that possess agency, like well-defined biological individuals; (ii) we run into conceptual problems when distributing agency across levels of organization that are not only understood as evolving over evolutionary time (from unicellular life to humans), but that arise and are lost various times during development and across life-cycles. Based on these two challenges, we hold that while the levels concept can confer powerful heuristics, the heuristic reach of the levels concept does not avail to the conceptual challenges facing biological agency. Thus, it is not sufficient to make the two notions compatible in a way resembling “levels of agency.”

Keywords: levels of organization; biological agency; individuality; development; life cycle