Internal conflicts in collective agents |
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Organisms and Firms
This work is a collaboration with Arvid Ågren (Cleveland Clinic), Armin Schulz (University of Kansas), Martijn Schenkel (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz/University of Groningen), and Raja Panjwani (Georgetown University).
Economic firms and biological organisms are both collective agents. That is, despite being made of smaller parts—parts that may be said to have agency of their own—we can treat them as coherent entities that possess goals and interests, separate from those of their parts. This arrangement invites conflict between the parts and also between the parts and the collective. Our main question is this: How do collective agents—whether they are firms in economics or multicellular organisms in biology—overcome these internal conflicts and avoid being torn apart from within?
This question can be broken down into a number of smaller, interrelated questions about internal conflicts in firms and organisms. These sub-questions fall into two broad themes:
Economic firms and biological organisms are both collective agents. That is, despite being made of smaller parts—parts that may be said to have agency of their own—we can treat them as coherent entities that possess goals and interests, separate from those of their parts. This arrangement invites conflict between the parts and also between the parts and the collective. Our main question is this: How do collective agents—whether they are firms in economics or multicellular organisms in biology—overcome these internal conflicts and avoid being torn apart from within?
This question can be broken down into a number of smaller, interrelated questions about internal conflicts in firms and organisms. These sub-questions fall into two broad themes:
- The kinds of internal conflicts faced by collective agents in biology and economics. Are there general types of internal conflicts in collective agents? Or, put another way, is it possible to classify and organize different sorts of internal conflicts in collective agents (whether firms or organisms)?
- The ways by which internal conflicts are resolved. Is there something about the ways in which firms and organisms develop that predicts and shapes the internal conflicts they experience and how they are resolved?
The Paradox of the Organism
This work was undertaken in collaboration with Arvid Ågren, Cleveland Clinic, and our postdoc, Martijn Schenkel, University of Groningen.
Organisms are special. Although they are material objects, made of the same molecules as mountains and subject to the same physical laws as fires, they are different from all other material objects. Organisms appear to be endowed with a goal directedness absent from non-living things and are therefore the entities that invite purpose into scientific explanations. Combining Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which centers on purposeful organisms—organisms that struggle to survive environmental pressures, organisms that compete for access to mates—with the molecular biology revolution of the following century, which adopted a more Cartesian view of the body-as-machine, one emerges with a view that agency—i.e., the possession of interests, goals, and strategies—belongs to the individual organism, but also with the view that genes, genomes, and cells are mere machinery, working on behalf of the organism.
Despite its allure, this approach to biological agency has serious shortcomings. Most pressingly, modern genetics and cell biology have revealed that different parts of the genome and the body do not always serve the interests of the organism. Rather, the unity of purpose required for evolutionary agency to reside solely with individuals is constantly threatened from within by other agents, such as cancer cells and selfish genetic elements, which have the ability to promote their own propagation at the expense of other cells and genes. In the case of selfish genetic elements, these are not a mere curiosity; they are, in fact, the dominant component of animal and plant genomes. For example, transposable elements (also known as jumping genes), make up 50% of the human genome, and more than 80% of some plant genomes. Similarly, cancer is not restricted to humans and other mammals, but occurs in multicellular bodies across the tree of life.
And yet despite the opportunity for selfish genetic elements and cancer cells to erode the organism from within and shift agency to a lower level of organization, they usually do not. This is the paradox of the organism (a term first coined by Dawkins).
The work described above was part of a larger effort on Agency, Directionality, and Function, which was led by Alan Love at the University of Minnesota and which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
Organisms are special. Although they are material objects, made of the same molecules as mountains and subject to the same physical laws as fires, they are different from all other material objects. Organisms appear to be endowed with a goal directedness absent from non-living things and are therefore the entities that invite purpose into scientific explanations. Combining Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which centers on purposeful organisms—organisms that struggle to survive environmental pressures, organisms that compete for access to mates—with the molecular biology revolution of the following century, which adopted a more Cartesian view of the body-as-machine, one emerges with a view that agency—i.e., the possession of interests, goals, and strategies—belongs to the individual organism, but also with the view that genes, genomes, and cells are mere machinery, working on behalf of the organism.
Despite its allure, this approach to biological agency has serious shortcomings. Most pressingly, modern genetics and cell biology have revealed that different parts of the genome and the body do not always serve the interests of the organism. Rather, the unity of purpose required for evolutionary agency to reside solely with individuals is constantly threatened from within by other agents, such as cancer cells and selfish genetic elements, which have the ability to promote their own propagation at the expense of other cells and genes. In the case of selfish genetic elements, these are not a mere curiosity; they are, in fact, the dominant component of animal and plant genomes. For example, transposable elements (also known as jumping genes), make up 50% of the human genome, and more than 80% of some plant genomes. Similarly, cancer is not restricted to humans and other mammals, but occurs in multicellular bodies across the tree of life.
And yet despite the opportunity for selfish genetic elements and cancer cells to erode the organism from within and shift agency to a lower level of organization, they usually do not. This is the paradox of the organism (a term first coined by Dawkins).
The work described above was part of a larger effort on Agency, Directionality, and Function, which was led by Alan Love at the University of Minnesota and which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
