But on what basis do you claim that it is ‘epiphenomenal’? I understand that is the implicit assumption of mainstream biology, from which intentionality has already been excluded as a matter of definition, and which has to describe it as ‘apparent’. Which is why you’re begging the question! You’re assuming what needs to be shown.
The fact is that organic life acts in a way that no inorganic compounds do: it acts to preserve itself against the pressure of entropy. That some organisms or early forms of organisms did not do this illustrates nothing other than the fact that they didn’t succeed. They died. It’s well known that a vast percentage of life-forms that evolved have become extinct. But that doesn’t negate the point: that organic life itself exhibits a form of intentionality, that crystals, rocks and hurricanes do not. The organism produces and maintains the boundary that defines it as an organism.
I think it presents an obvious challenge to Newtonian deism, because it points to the sense in which intentionality is made manifest in the organic domain from the outset and how it continues to manifest, rather than withdrawing to some ostensible but un-knowable ‘beginning’. The programmer is unknowable, uncontactable, outside the system. Whereas the hylomorphic/phenomenological picture makes intentionality the most immediately known thing there is — it’s what experience itself is.
Anyway - this is the wrong thread to debate that in detail, perhaps I might start one on this subject in particular.