From Darwin to Varela, and Beyond?: On BVSR as a Generative Principle for Teleonomy

Abstract

How can adaptive, purposive-looking order arise in a non-teleological world without an intrinsically goal-directed agent? This paper reconstructs one recurrent answer—blind variation and selective retention (BVSR)—as a generative schema for teleonomy, tracing a single lineage from Darwinian natural selection through Ashby’s ultrastability and Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis to the enactivism of the later Varela and his successors. Read this way, each framework reworks a common logic—locally generated, foresightless variation under a selective constraint—while transforming it in timescale, level of organization, and criterion of evaluation: from continuous, population-level fitness, through the all-or-nothing viability of a single system, to the graded adaptivity of enactive agents. This lens also exposes a tension. Contemporary enactivism aspires to an immanent teleology irreducible to teleonomy; yet insofar as its adaptivity and agency can themselves be reconstructed as multilayered BVSR, it is not clear that anything stronger than teleonomy has been secured. The paper’s aim is not to pronounce for or against BVSR but to delineate its scope—to make explicit what it presupposes (a broadly classical, mechanistic image of nature) and what its success actually establishes (that purposive-looking order can be generated, not that an irreducible teleology has been naturalized). This clarification bears directly on artificial life, whose philosophical significance lies less in what its models can simulate than in what those simulations tacitly take for granted. Data/Code available at: https://github.com/Ryuzo-hirota/scl-autopoiesis