Biological Agents An organism used to control a particular pest. This includes toxins produced by organisms, plants or animals. The chosen organism might be a predator, parasite, or disease, which will attack the pest.

wants to know what sorts of biological systems should be expected from a non-natural designer. What's more, Sober claims that if the design theorist cannot answer this question (i.e., cannot predict the sorts of biological systems that might be

inside complex objects. Many biological systems are extremely complex, but effects can still be traced to external causes. They will only disappear into objects that possess sufficient complexity and internal degrees of freedom that our instruments

they are certainly agents where computer programmes are not. But the degrees of complexity and internal freedom that we see in the next few generations of robotics will surely remain a far cry from biological systems. Personally, I

outside those achieved by agents, can exhaustively be explained solely by means of efficient causes. His position includes scientific and philosophical arguments about the sufficiency of efficient causal explanations. The second stage

we are dealing with human agents whose actions in history are reasonably well understood. But the distinction he would draw between this example, involving the transmission of texts, and the previous biological example, involving the origin of