Quote of the Week
(November 10, 2025)

We might wonder whether the effort to define unambiguous biological causes always resists a final resolution in terms other than those of form — that is, resists our attempts to explain form. If in fact a biological performance always involves an intentional, directed (that is, temporally formed) coordination of physically lawful interactions, then explanation in terms of the physical interactions alone will never rise to the level of biological understanding. It is the pattern — the thought-infused, aesthetic, and qualitative aspect of the coordination — the meaning of it all — that we really want to lay hold of. The form of an organism’s body and behavior just is this meaning put on display.

Perhaps, in other words, we never are, at any stage of our investigation, tracing physical mechanisms that explain observed form. Perhaps apprehending form in its own terms — and doing so as perceptively as possible — is how we make sense of biological phenomena, because form is itself the decisive explanatory principle. It seems worth considering whether form is what every material phenomenon most essentially is for our understanding. After all, the form of a thing is not just a particular feature that can be pasted onto the thing. It belongs to the creative, interior aspect that makes the thing this sort of appearance and not that sort.

(from Chapter 11, “Why We Cannot Explain the Form of Organisms”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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