The next session of the IAS Seminar will take place this Friday, 27th of March at 1pm. Centro Carlos Santamaria, Room TBA. The talk will be hybrid, to participate remotely contact: alberto.monterde@ehu.eus

Our speaker will be Andrea Gambarotto (Université du Luxembourg), who will present: Science, society, and the normativity of science governance

Abstract

The paper argues for an integration of the theoretical legacies of Lewontin and Varela with regard to the role of organismal agency in evolution. Our main claim is that such an integration is necessary to develop a unified dialectical biology. Lewontin foregrounds reciprocal determination between organism and environment, while Varela emphasizes internal organization that sustains biological individuality. We stress how many criticisms of the ecological-agential perspective inspired by Lewontin in the philosophy of biology arise from its insufficient articulation of the organizational basis of agency. The organizational account issued from Varela’s work grounds agency in the adaptive and regulatory capacities of autonomous systems that allow them to modulate their metabolism and behavior in response to changing environmental cues. We extend this perspective to the evolutionary domain by introducing the notion of cross-generational regulation: the feature of an autonomous system charged with biasing development in adaptive ways. What is conserved across generations, we argue, is not merely organizational closure, but regulated closure: the stable yet plastic patterns through which the organism actively maintains its coupling with the environment. The resulting picture reframes evolution as the historical expression of organismal autonomy, in which biological individuals are not merely objects of natural selection, but also subjects whose adaptive capacities contribute to enact their evolutionary trajectories.