Do Organisms Have Goals and Purpose?

The article critically examines prevailing neo-Darwinian paradigms in evolutionary biology and animal behavior, highlighting their gene-centric and adaptationist frameworks that often reduce organisms to passive entities shaped solely by natural selection and binary reinforcement learning. It contrasts this with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), which recognizes organisms as sentient agents capable of teleological, goal-directed interactions with their environment that influence their own evolution through processes like niche construction and transgenerational inheritance. The article also critiques common experimental paradigms in animal behavior research for their reductionism and bias toward compliant subjects, arguing that such methods inadequately capture the complexity of animal cognition and sentience. Examples such as animal migration and trophobiosis (farming behaviors in ants) are presented to illustrate behaviors that challenge neo-Darwinian explanations and support the need for more holistic, agency-inclusive evolutionary models.