A new understanding of living organisms is being urged upon us by the intense ongoing work in molecular biology. Biologists have long insisted that life can be explained as nothing more than matter and mechanism, that it is intrinsically meaningless. And yet they increasingly describe organisms as expressing, gesturing beings — as if living beings are pervaded with meaning. In this series, Stephen L. Talbott presents a view of the organism as a purposive unity that is emerging from biology in spite of its own ideology.