Autonomy and Development: Distinguishing teleological development from teleological physiology

An agential and organismic view of development has brought back certain concepts in biology, such as teleology and normativity. What are the goals and norms that a developmental system pursues? Where do phenotypes in ontogenesis come from? The common answer is that genes contain the recipe to build organisms. However, the agential and organismic view of development seeks to offer a different answer beyond any reductionist explanations. For this reason, teleological development has become a central explanans in developmental and evolutionary biology. However, the motivation for this article is that teleological development as an explanandum has not been treated with the same intensity and rigor despite its ubiquity as an explanans. In particular, a common and now widely adopted strategy for explaining teleological development is to appeal to a closely related, yet fundamentally distinct, conception of teleology: the theory of autonomous systems, a theory designed to deal with physiological-level processes, not developmental ones. This article explores the (generally unanalyzed) differences between teleological development and teleological physiology by arguing that autonomous systems theory falls short of explaining the specificity of teleological development. The main conclusion is that the agential and organismic views in biology ought to be broadened to include different goals beyond self-maintenance; that to be alive is not only about the maintenance of an organization. The distinctiveness of teleological development entails specific philosophical puzzles—what I call Bernard and Baer’s desiderata—that are neither present in nor solved by autonomous systems theory.