Not sure I'm willing to follow you all the way down to molecules, but on the cellular level, it's worth looking at Michael Levin's work on cellular self-organization during both embryonic development and regeneration. It's plausible that, for cellular organisms, it's levels of intent all the way down to the cell. There's been some interesting work out of his lab with 'xenobots' (frog epithelial cells allowed to self-organize on their own turn into something very unlike a frog even though the DNA is unchanged).

FWIW, if you read Aristotle, he had a similar view of the world (e.g. a rock falls because it wants to).