The Machine, the Organism, the Machine

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Inecanb thinking of organisms as machines is goes back a long way. And i sho, how much should we allow ourselves to talk in terms of of purpose? That is something that really runs quite deep in imbiology. I think it's awkwardly trying to balance the two. On one end, is a physical science, but the undherhand is a behavior of science. It's no lan vital tere's nothing can of spoky going on. But you have kind of allowed yourself then, to use a kind of language which otherwise isn't really in science.

One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin’s theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently “purposeful” or “designed” aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolution. Features are good if they help organisms survive. But should we put organisms at the center of our attention, or the genetic information that governs those features? Arvid Ågren helps us understand the attraction of the “selfish gene” view of evolution, as well as its shortcomings. This biological excursion has deep connections to philosophical issues of levels and emergence.

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Arvid Ågren received his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Toronto. He is currently a Wenner-Gren Fellow at the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University. Previously he worked at Cornell and Harvard. His recent book is The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution.

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