There is a quiet bafflement that many scientists share but rarely articulate.
Animals routinely produce behaviour that is:
situationally appropriate,
exquisitely timed,
robust to noise and novelty,
and often creatively adaptive.
They do this without plans, representations, explicit goals, or meanings.
And yet, when we look for an explanation of how this is possible, we find mostly evasions.
This post names the gap those evasions are designed to conceal.
The phenomenon that refuses to go away
Consider a bird landing on a branch in gusty wind. A wolf coordinating with a pack in unfamiliar terrain. An octopus manipulating a novel object. An ant adjusting a trail when conditions shift.
These behaviours are not rigid reflexes. They are not pre-scripted sequences. They are not simple stimulus–response chains.
They are adequate to the situation — even when the situation is new.
Whatever else we say about animals, this much is undeniable:
they reliably do what works, when it matters, without knowing what they are doing.
This is the phenomenon that needs explaining.
How explanation quietly slips sideways
Most scientific accounts respond to this challenge by subtly changing the question.
Instead of explaining situated behavioural adequacy, they explain one of the following:
1. Mechanism without competence
We are told about:
neural circuitry,
hormonal modulation,
genetic regulation,
reinforcement histories.
All of this is real. None of it explains how, here and now, an animal produces the next appropriate move in a changing world.
Mechanisms enable behaviour. They do not account for its situational fit.
2. Evolutionary hindsight
Alternatively, we are offered selection stories:
“This behaviour evolved to achieve X.”
But this explains only why behaviours persist, not how they are produced.
Selection operates retrospectively across populations. Behaviour must operate prospectively within moments.
The explanatory time-scales do not match.
3. Statistical redescription
Sometimes behaviour is redescribed as the outcome of probability distributions or optimisation processes.
This can model patterns across trials.
It does not explain how a single animal coordinates a single action under pressure.
4. Representational smuggling
Finally — and most pervasively — we find the language of cognition quietly imported:
strategies,
decisions,
information processing,
signals with content.
These terms do explanatory work only because they borrow from human meaning-making.
They solve the problem by assuming it away.
The gap, stated plainly
What none of these approaches explain is this:
How can an organism reliably produce novel, situation-sensitive behaviour without representing the situation, without knowing the goal, and without consulting meanings?
This is not a minor omission.
It is the central fact of animal life.
Why this gap is tolerated
The gap persists because it is uncomfortable.
To take it seriously would require us to give up several deeply ingrained assumptions:
that competence requires cognition,
that flexibility requires representation,
that adequacy implies foresight or intention.
Rather than relinquish these assumptions, we soften the problem until it disappears.
But the phenomenon does not disappear.
It continues, every time an animal does exactly what the situation demands.
A different starting point
This series begins from a simple refusal:
We will not explain animal behaviour by importing meaning, representation, or intention where they do not belong.
Instead, we will ask a different kind of question:
What must be true of a system such that appropriate behaviour can be actualised without being planned, represented, or understood?
Answering that question will require a shift in how we think about:
systems and instances,
value and meaning,
environment and organism,
novelty and competence.
That shift begins in the next post.
For now, it is enough to recognise the gap — and to stop pretending it has already been closed.
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