The origins of purpose: The first metasystem transitions

Abstract

This speculative essay concerns the origins of purposive behavior and proposes that this is identically the origin of life. Negative feedback and control offer a self‐selecting mechanism that accounts for the long‐term stability of replication of the genome, and a related concept of reorganization offers a rationale for the progress of evolved forms into those which exert greater and greater control over the local environment. A picture emerges in which the basic principle of control runs like a unifying thread from the first living molecules to modern complex organisms.