Abstract

The problems of organismal agency and phenotypic plasticity present significant interest for modern developmental and evolutionary biology, as well as comparative and biosemiotic approaches. At the same time, the question of how behavioural and other proximal phenotypic factors may potentially drive developmental and evolutionary variation remains open, particularly in relation to life-history and allometric theory (where the issue of agency has been seldom explored). To fill these gaps, this chapter revisits the anti-entropic (negentropic) approach to ontogeny developed by I.A. Arshavsky (1903–1996) and his school. Within this tradition, diverse developmental processes and organisms were studied in order to understand how biological agency and phenotypic plasticity can be interrelated and together affect the formation and integration of biological traits – including the remarkable physiological and morphological features distinguishing primarily altricial (immaturely born) from primarily precocial (maturely born) eutherians. This chapter revisits these concepts and results in the light of current research. In particular, that Arshavsky’s non-equilibrium approach may still help to frame new questions and integrative concepts is shown with respect to certain unresolved problems of metabolic scaling, including the apparent biophysical paradox of increased work capacity and bioenergetic reserves in larger/more precocial organisms. Finally, we shall also consider a novel anti-entropic hypothesis regarding possible agential origins of the prolonged gestation and reduced offspring numbers in such animals, which may have a variety of implications for current work in biology and biosemiotics.