How Purposive Agency Became Banned from Evolutionary Biology

Abstract

Purposive "agency" featured strongly in the nineteenth-century ideas on evolution of Charles Darwin.It was removed by the neo-Darwinians, Alfred Russel Wallace and August Weismann.The modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, as it was originally formulated by Julian Huxley in 1942, incorporated the ideas of Wallace and Weismann, but nevertheless included a wide range of evolutionary pro cesses.The scope of the modern synthesis became vastly reduced during its simplification in the 1960s and 1970s.In this paper we identify the main historical developments leading to these outcomes.We also summarize the utility and predictive ability as reasons for which purposive agency should to be restored in the study of living organisms.

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