Rebecca Riccardo Cuciniello

This paper offers a biological concept of gender for human and nonhuman organisms, by intersecting recent debates on male and female anisogametic sex categories with hypotheses for gender concepts in biology and the organismal-relational and agential perspective regarding sex and reproduction. By looking at real-life cases of sex-changing fish, parasitised arthropods, and gender-traitor primates, it argues that male and female sexes are problematic functional categories (sect. 2), that gender can describe sexual reproductive agency beyond the binary (sect. 3), and can also be extended beyond sexual reproduction in human and nonhuman organisms (sect. 4). In doing so, the paper formulates a novel biological concept of gender as gendered agency that overcomes human exceptionalism about gender while also articulating both the distinction and relation between sex and gender in biology.

The Organisational Approach (OA) draws from Kant’s notion of natural purpose to offer a naturalistic account of teleology grounded in biological organisation, and a characterisation of biological purposiveness, i.e. what goals organisms have, and how they seek and achieve them. This paper re-examines the OA in light of two persistent issues: (1) whether organisational teleology can be causally realised in a way compatible with mechanism; and (2) how far the OA successfully extends across biological areas, development in particular. I distinguish two versions of the OA: a minimal model, focused on the self-maintenance of a stable organisation; a regulative model, which introduces regulation as a principle of teleological change. I argue that the minimal model successfully naturalises teleology, but at the price of a too narrow view of purposiveness as physiological self-maintenance. Instead, the regulative model offers a sui generis and potentially fruitful view of teleological change, blurring the boundary between physiology and development; however, it struggles to remain a naturalistic account. I introduce “design” and “epigeneticity” criteria for biological teleology to show how different ways of defining biological goals can either hinder or favour teleological naturalism, and thus the OA itself. This paper thus clarifies what kind of teleology the OA can naturalise, and where further theoretical work is required.