This bibliography gathers publications over many years from a variety of researchers exploring topics of agency, directionality, and function (among others) with a special emphasis on CASP members. It began with work from teams within the initial Agency, Directionality and Function project and continues to be populated with papers and articles from diverse researchers looking to further develop and expand ways of working interdisciplinarily on the complex theme of teleology.
Included in the bibliography are entries for publications and books that many scholars involved in the Agency, Directionality and Function project recommended as foundational texts in their field of study. We welcome suggestions for additions to the bibliography from CASP members.
Causation in Development and Evolution
Snell-Rood, E. C., & Kobiela, M. E. (2023). Rearing the Cabbage White Butterfly (Pieris rapae) in Controlled Conditions: A Case Study with Heavy Metal Tolerance. Journal of Visualized Experiments, 198, 65383.
Sreepadmanabh, M., Ganesh, M., Bhat, R., & Bhattacharjee, T. (2023). Jammed microgel growth medium prepared by flash-solidification of agarose for 3D cell culture and 3D bioprinting [Preprint]. Bioengineering.
Sultan, S.E. (2015). Organism and Environment: Ecological Development, Niche Construction, and Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Takacs, P., & Bourrat, P. (2022). The arithmetic mean of what? A Cautionary Tale about the Use of the Geometric Mean as a Measure of Fitness. Biology & Philosophy, 37(2), 12.
Uller, T. (2023). Agency, Goal Orientation, and Evolutionary Explanations. Evolution "On Purpose": Teleonomy in Living Systems. MIT Press.
Walsh, D. (2022). Environment as Abstraction. Biological Theory, 17(1), 68–79.
Walsh, D. M., & Rupik, G. (2023). The agential perspective: Countermapping the modern synthesis. Evolution & Development, ede.12448.
Watson, Richard A., Levin, Michael., Lewens, Tim. (2025). Evolution by natural induction. Interface Focus 15 (6): 20250025. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2025.0025
Watson, Richard A., Levin, Michael., Lewens, Tim. (2025). Evolution by natural induction II: further interactions with natural selection. Interface Focus 15 (6): 20250036. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2025.0036
Williams, T. A., Davin, A. A., Morel, B., Szánthó, L. L., Spang, A., Stamatakis, A., Hugenholtz, P., & Szöllősi, G. J. (2023). The power and limitations of species tree-aware phylogenetics [Preprint]. Evolutionary Biology.
Wucherpfennig, J. I., Howes, T. R., Au, J. N., Au, E. H., Roberts Kingman, G. A., Brady, S. D., Herbert, A. L., Reimchen, T. E., Bell, M. A., Lowe, C. B., Dalziel, A. C., & Kingsley, D. M. (2022). Evolution of stickleback spines through independent cis-regulatory changes at HOXDB. Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Yazdi, H. P., Olito, C., Kawakami, T., Unneberg, P., Schou, M. F., Cloete, S. W. P., Hansson, B., & Cornwallis, C. K. (2023). The evolutionary maintenance of ancient recombining sex chromosomes in the ostrich. PLOS Genetics, 19(6), e1010801.
Zambre, A. M., Burns, L., Suresh, J., Hegeman, A. D., & Snell-Rood, E. C. (n.d.). Developmental plasticity in multimodal signals: light environment produces novel signalling phenotypes in a butterfly. 6.
Classification / Taxonomy
Aguadé-Gorgorió, G., Arnoldi, J.-F., Barbier, M., & Kéfi, S. (2023). A taxonomy of multiple stable states in complex ecological communities [Preprint]. Ecology.
Cuypers, V., & Reydon, T. A. C. (2023). An oak is an oak, or not? Understanding and dealing with confusion and disagreement in biological classification. Biology & Philosophy, 38(5), 39.
Donoghue, P. C. J., Kay, C., Spang, A., Szöllősi, G., Nenarokova, A., Moody, E. R. R., Pisani, D., & Williams, T. A. (2023). Defining eukaryotes to dissect eukaryogenesis. Current Biology, 33(17), R919–R929.
Foster, P. G., Schrempf, D., Szöllősi, G. J., Williams, T. A., Cox, C. J., & Embley, T. M. (2023). Recoding Amino Acids to a Reduced Alphabet may Increase or Decrease Phylogenetic Accuracy. Systematic Biology, 72(3), 723–737.
Holm, S. (2023). Egalitarianism and Algorithmic Fairness. Philosophy & Technology, 36(1), 6.
Juravel, K., Porras, L., Höhna, S., Pisani, D., & Wörheide, G. (2023). Exploring genome gene content and morphological analysis to test recalcitrant nodes in the animal phylogeny. PLOS ONE, 18(3), e0282444.
Love, A. C., & Wagner, G. P. (2023). Telling stories about unseen ancestors. Current Biology, 33(16), R841–R842.
Morel, B., Williams, T. A., & Stamatakis, A. (2023). Asteroid: a new algorithm to infer species trees from gene trees under high proportions of missing data. Bioinformatics, 39(1), btac832.
Nieves Delgado, A., Ludwig, D., & El-Hani, C. (2023). Pluralist Ethnobiology: Between Philosophical Reflection and Transdisciplinary Action. Journal of Ethnobiology, 43(3), 191–197.
Paz-Sedano, S., Smirnoff, D., Candás, M., Gosliner, T. M., & Pola, M. (2022). Rediscovering the overlooked genus Murphydoris (Nudibranchia: Goniodorididae): the first phylogeny and addition of four new species. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 196(1), 250–269.
Paz-Sedano, S., Smirnoff, D., Gosliner, T. M., & Pola, M. (2023). When a genus must become two: resurrection of Pelagella Gray, 1850 with the description of six new species. Journal of Molluscan Studies, 89(2), eyad008.