Quote of the Week
(December 8, 2025)

Non-living explanations have one advantage: they conveniently avoid all those troublesome words arising from organic contexts and life stories — words such as intention and purposiveness, idea and thought, agency and end-directedness, interests and meaning. Most biologists prefer to have nothing to do with such terms.

One stumbling block associated with those words is that they relate to features of our own inner lives — our human experience. It is, of course, healthy to avoid an anthropomorphic projection of human experience upon other organisms, where it does not belong. But we, too, are organisms, and therefore we have no cause to question whether conscious human experience belongs in our biological science. Instead we can only ask, “Where does this experience belong in our biological science?”

If we ignore the character of our own life and experience, can we fully understand a world that mustered its resources, material and otherwise, in human form — a world that ultimately came to present itself in the form of human understanding? And how can any biologist today make the evolution-denying assumption that our own experience has absolutely nothing to do with our evolutionary ancestors — was in no way pre-figured in them? Further, how can we gain legitimate scientific understanding, if it is not empirical — if it is not an expression of our most rigorously considered, human experience?

(from Chapter 13, “All Science Must Be Rooted in Experience”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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