 In the area of religion and biology , he co @-@ wrote The Liberation of Life : From the Cell to the Community with Australian geneticist Charles Birch in 1981 . The book critiqued the dominant biological model of mechanism , arguing that it leads to the study of organisms in abstraction from their environments . Cobb and Birch argue instead for an " ecological model " which draws no sharp lines between the living and non @-@ living , or between an organism and its environment . The book also argues for an idea of evolution in which adaptive behavior can lead to genetic changes . Cobb and Birch stress that a species " co @-@ evolves with its environment , " and that in this way intelligent purpose plays a role in evolution : 
