Publication highlights

Humans intuitively tend to attribute agency to living things and to interpret their behaviour in teleological terms. A number of scientists have recently proposed that the agency of organisms is an important phenomenon for evolutionary biology to study. Proponents claim that agency—the capacity for goal-directed, self-determining activity—is not explainable by physiological or developmental mechanisms, or by adaptation via natural selection. This paper shows that this idea is theoretically unsound and unsupported by current biology. Instead, we argue, agency in simple organisms is a cognitive illusion, and the phenomena that the agency perspective purports to make sense of are better explained using the well-established idea that feedback mechanisms evolve through natural selection.