After nearly two decades of meticulous research, penetrating reflection, and skillful writing and revision, we are delighted that Steve Talbott’s magnum opus, Organisms and Their Evolution: Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life, is now available as a physical book.

The first half of the book brings readers face to face with the fact that every organism is a striving agent. Each organism pursues its own meanings and purposes in the manner of its particular species. Steve shows how this is true not only of animal behavior, but all the way down to the molecular and cellular levels. Whether a cell is dividing — becoming two cells, with each daughter cell re-organizing itself as a living entity — or replicating its DNA, or carrying out the infinitely varying work of metabolism, it is always directing its activity with a remarkable wisdom.

The second half of Steve’s book takes up evolution and asks, “Is the future-oriented organizing ability of organisms and their cells really irrelevant to evolution, as so many seem to think today?” During much of the 20th century, biologists, bound by the repressive doctrine of Behaviorism, could not speak of a human mind. And when, during the last decades of the century, the taboo was finally shattered, it gave rise to what is now called the “Cognitive Revolution” and along with it an invigorating renewal of consciousness studies. When biologists break through the taboo against reckoning with meaning and purpose in the life of organisms — when they can openly acknowledge every organism's agency, as they are showing early signs of doing today — the consequences for our understanding of biology and evolution may dwarf those of the Cognitive Revolution. These consequences are what Steve’s book is about.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I: THE LIFE OF ORGANISMS

1: The Keys to This Book

2: The Organism's Story

3: What Brings Our Genome Alive?

4: The Sensitive, Dynamic Cell

5: Our Bodies are Formed Streams

6: Context: Dare We Call It Holism?

7: Epigenetics: A Brief Introduction

8: The Mystery of an Unexpected Coherence

9: A Mess of Causes

10: What is the Problem of Form?

11: Why We Cannot Explain the Form of Organisms

12: Is a Qualitative Biology Possible?

13: All Science Must Be Rooted in Experience

14: How Our Genes Come to Expression

15: Puzzles of the Microworld

PART II: EXTENDING THE ORGANISM’S STORY — TOWARD AN EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE

16: Let's Not Begin with Natural Selection

17: Evolution Write Small

18: Teleology and Evolution

19: Development Writ Large

20: Inheritance and the Whole Organism

21: Inheritance, Genetics, and the Particulate View of Life

22: A Curiously Absolute Demand for Stable Variation

23: The Evolution of Consciousness

PART III: BEYOND BIOLOGY

24: Is the Inanimate World an Interior Reality?