Teleology
How shall we understand goal directedness, or what is also called teleology? How is a bacterium able to find and move consistently toward its food? How is a cell able to migrate to a target location in a developing embryo? How does a homing torpedo find a trajectory, and stay on a trajectory, toward a target ship? What explains human purposefulness, in other words, how our wants, preferences, and intentions guide our behavior? And then, is evolution goal directed? Are there purposeful machines? Just what is teleology?
There is something magical about these systems — systems in which entities seems to be guided by the future. A developing acorn seemingly guided by the oak tree it will once day become. Somehow … (See teleology.)
Complexity
In a 2010 book, Biology’s First Law, philosopher Robert Brandon and I argued that change in complexity and diversity in evolution are governed by what we call the Zero-Force Evolutionary Law (ZFEL). 
Our 2020 book, The Missing Two Thirds of Evolutionary Theory, offers a quantitative version of the law and discusses some of the objections that the 2010 book inspired.
The law says that in the absence of selection and constraint, complexity (in the sense of differentiation among parts) and diversity (in the sense of differentiation among species) will tend to increase. Further, even when forces and constraints are present, a tendency for complexity and diversity to increase is always present. Let’s begin with complexity (although the law for diversity precisely parallels it). The argument is that when selection is absent, the parts of an organism — say, the segments of a worm — should tend spontaneously to accumulate variation, and therefore to become more different from each other. At the cell level, the claim is that, absent selection and constraint, the degree of differentiation among cells in a multicellular organism should increase with the accumulation of heritable accidents (e.g., mutation), leading eventually to an increase in the number of cell types. … (See: complexity.)
