Abstract

In recent years, biologists and philosophers of science have argued that evolutionary theory should incorporate more seriously the idea of ‘reciprocal causation.’ This notion refers to feedback loops whereby organisms change their experiences of the environment or alter the physical properties of their surroundings. In these loops, in particular niche constructing activities are central, since they may alter selection pressures acting on organisms, and thus affect their evolutionary trajectories. This paper discusses long-standing problems that emerge when studying such reciprocal causal processes between organisms and environments. By comparing past approaches to reciprocal causation from the early twentieth century with contemporary ones in niche construction theory, we identify two central reoccurring problems: All of these approaches have not been able to provide a conceptual framework that allows (i) maintaining meaningful boundaries between organisms and environments, instead of merging the two, and (ii) integrating experiential and physical kinds of reciprocal causation. By building on case studies of niche construction research, we provide a model that is able to solve these two problems. It allows distinguishing between mutually interacting organisms and environments in complex scenarios, as well as integrating various forms of experiential and physical niche construction.

Highlights

  • ‘Reciprocity’ has become a buzzword in current biological parlance, especially in debates about the purported reciprocal nature of many developmental and evolutionary processes (e.g., Laland et al 2011, 2013; Moczek 2015; Schwab et al 2019; Uller and Laland 2019)

  • From this vast array of views on reciprocity in ecology and evolution, we will focus on organism-environment reciprocal causation, given that this has been the main target of recent heated discussions about niche construction theory (NCT) and the so-called ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’ (Laland et al 2015, 2017; see Fábregas-Tejeda and Vergara-Silva 2018b)

  • Outside the NCT literature there exists a large body of fruitful ecological projects that study, for example, how landscape features drive avoidance behaviors through experiences of fear and disgust (Sheriff and Thaler 2014; Gaynor et al 2019). While these developments suggest that problems of integrating physical and experiential reciprocal processes between organism and environment might not be as widespread in ecology as they are in evolutionary biology, these new conceptual frameworks have not yet exerted influence on evolutionary methodologies

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Summary

Introduction

‘Reciprocity’ has become a buzzword in current biological parlance, especially in debates about the purported reciprocal nature of many developmental and evolutionary processes (e.g., Laland et al 2011, 2013; Moczek 2015; Schwab et al 2019; Uller and Laland 2019). We identify two main theoretical problems in these early conceptual frameworks that contributed to this development: They could not (i) maintain (meaningful) epistemic boundaries between organisms and environments, but instead merged the two, and (ii) failed to integrate physical kinds of reciprocal causation with those in which organisms’ experience of the environment plays a key role. These shortcomings led to methodological intractability and untranslatability to experimental interventions. We show that the organism-environment boundary is an epistemic necessity to understand complex causality in NC processes, including the causal roles each component plays in them

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Relational niche construction
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Full Text
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