Chris Fields and Michael Levin (2020) posit that Active Inference “provide(s) conceptual tools for reconceptualizing biology as the study of a unified, multiscale dynamical system”.
Ramstead et. al (2019) have leveraged active inference and the underlying free energy principle to characterize variational neuroethology, a theoretical ontology for living systems based on a recursively nested formulation of Markov blankets.
Friston et. al (2023) introduce a variational formulation of natural selection to explain how slow phylogenetic processes constrain—and are constrained by—fast, phenotypic processes.