Entangled life: organism and environment in the biological and social sciences

277 Pages·2014·2.394 MB·English

by  Barker, Gillian;Desjardins, Eric;Pearce, Trevor

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences
Gillian Barker
Eric Desjardins
Trevor Pearce E ditors
Entangled
Life
Organism and Environment in the
Biological and Social Sciences
Entangled Life
History, Philosophy and Theory
of the Life Sciences
Volume 4
Editors:
CharlesT.Wolfe,GhentUniversity,Belgium
PhilippeHuneman,IHPST(CNRS/Universite´ParisIPanthe´on-Sorbonne),France
ThomasA.C.Reydon,LeibnizUniversita¨tHannover,Germany
EditorialBoard:
MarshallAbrams(UniversityofAlabamaatBirmingham)
AndreAriew(Missouri)
MinusvanBaalen(UPMC,Paris)
DomenicoBertoloniMeli(Indiana)
RichardBurian(VirginiaTech)
PietroCorsi(EHESS,Paris)
Franc¸oisDuchesneau(Universite´deMontre´al)
JohnDupre´(Exeter)
PaulFarber(OregonState)
LisaGannett(SaintMary’sUniversity,Halifax)
AndyGardner(Oxford)
PaulGriffiths(Sydney)
JeanGayon(IHPST,Paris)
GuidoGiglioni(WarburgInstitute,London)
ThomasHeams(INRA,AgroParisTech,Paris)
JamesLennox(Pittsburgh)
AnnickLesne(CNRS,UPMC,Paris)
TimLewens(Cambridge)
EdouardMachery(Pittsburgh)
AlexandreMe´traux(ArchivesPoincare´,Nancy)
HansMetz(Leiden)
RobertaMillstein(Davis)
StaffanMu¨ller-Wille(Exeter)
DominicMurphy(Sydney)
Franc¸oisMunoz(Universite´Montpellier2)
StuartNewman(NewYorkMedicalCollege)
FrederikNijhout(Duke)
SamirOkasha(Bristol)
SusanOyama(CUNY)
KevinPadian(Berkeley)
DavidQueller(WashingtonUniversity,StLouis)
Ste´phaneSchmitt(SPHERE,CNRS,Paris)
PhillipSloan(NotreDame)
JacquelineSullivan(WesternUniversity,London,ON)
GiuseppeTesta(IFOM-IEA,Milano)
J.ScottTurner(Syracuse)
DenisWalsh(Toronto)
MarcelWeber(Geneva)
Forfurthervolumes:
http://www.springer.com/series/8916
Gillian Barker • Eric Desjardins • Trevor Pearce
Editors
Entangled Life
Organism and Environment in the Biological
and Social Sciences
123
Editors
GillianBarker EricDesjardins
DepartmentofPhilosophy DepartmentofPhilosophy
WesternUniversity WesternUniversity
London,Ontario London,Ontario
Canada Canada
TrevorPearce
DepartmentofPhilosophy
UniversityofNorthCarolinaatCharlotte
Charlotte,NorthCarolina
USA
ISSN2211-1948 ISSN2211-1956(electronic)
ISBN978-94-007-7066-9 ISBN978-94-007-7067-6(eBook)
DOI10.1007/978-94-007-7067-6
SpringerDordrechtHeidelbergNewYorkLondon
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2013946646
©SpringerScience+BusinessMediaDordrecht2014
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Contents
Introduction:PerspectivesonEntangledLife ................................ 1
GillianBarker,EricDesjardins,andTrevorPearce
PartI HistoricalPerspectives
The Origins and Development of the Idea
ofOrganism-EnvironmentInteraction ........................................ 13
TrevorPearce
James Mark Baldwin, the Baldwin Effect, Organic
Selection,andtheAmerican“ImmigrantCrisis”attheTurn
oftheTwentiethCentury........................................................ 33
ChristopherD.Green
The Tension Between the Psychological and Ecological
Sciences:MakingPsychologyMoreEcological............................... 51
HarryHeft
New Perspectives on Organism-Environment Interactions
inAnthropology.................................................................. 79
EmilyA.Schultz
PartII ContestedModels
Adaptation,Adaptationto,andInteractiveCauses.......................... 105
BruceGlymour
EnvironmentalGrain,OrganismFitness,andTypeFitness ................ 127
MarshallAbrams
ModelsinContext:BiologicalandEpistemologicalNiches ................. 153
JessicaA.Bolker
v
vi Contents
Thinking Outside the Mouse: Organism-Environment
InteractionandHumanImmunology.......................................... 167
EricDesjardins,GillianBarkerandJoaqu´ınMadrenas
PartIII EmergingFrameworks
Integrating Ecology and Evolution: Niche Construction
andEcologicalEngineering..................................................... 187
GillianBarkerandJohnOdling-Smee
TheAffordanceLandscape:TheSpatialMetaphorsofEvolution ......... 213
DenisM.Walsh
RethinkingBehavioralEvolution............................................... 237
RachaelBrown
ConstructingtheCooperativeNiche........................................... 261
KimSterelny
Introduction: Perspectives on Entangled Life
GillianBarker,EricDesjardins,andTrevorPearce
Abstract Despite burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of the
organism-environmentdyad,biologistsandphilosophersofbiologyhavepaidlittle
attentiontothehistoryoftheseideasandtotheirbroaderdeploymentinthesocial
sciences and in other disciplines outside biology. Even in biology and philosophy
of biology, detailed conceptual models of the organism-environment relationship
are still lacking. This volume is designed to fill these lacunae by providing the
firstmultidisciplinarydiscussionofthetopicoforganism-environmentinteraction.
It brings together scholars from history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology,
medicine,andbiologytodiscussthecommonfocusoftheirwork:entangledlife,or
thecomplexinteractionoforganismsandenvironments.
InSeptember1978,aspecialissueofScientificAmericanwaspublished,“devoted
to the history of life on earth as it is understood in the light of the modern
‘synthetic’theoryofevolution”(1978,47).IntroducedbythezoologistErnstMayr,
it comprised a series of articles by prominent scientists showing how that theory
made sense of the history of life, from its origins to the emergence of modern
humanbehavior.Thefinalarticleintheissue,however,stoodapartfromtheothers.
It offered an extended critique of a notion—adaptation—that was central to the
theoreticalperspectivecelebratedbytherest:anotionthathadindeedbeencentral
to studies of the natural world even before evolution came onto the scene. The
ideathattheenvironmentsets“problems”thatorganismsmust“solve”wasriddled
withdifficulties,accordingtogeneticistRichardLewontin(1978,213).Organisms,
G.Barker(!)•E.Desjardins
DepartmentofPhilosophy,WesternUniversity,London,ON,Canada
e-mail:[email protected];[email protected]
T.Pearce
DepartmentofPhilosophy,UniversityofNorthCarolinaatCharlotte,Charlotte,NC,USA
e-mail:[email protected]
G.Barkeretal.(eds.),EntangledLife,History,PhilosophyandTheory 1
oftheLifeSciences4,DOI10.1007/978-94-007-7067-6 1,
©SpringerScience BusinessMediaDordrecht2014
C
2 G.Barkeretal.
Lewontin insisted, are not passively shaped by the selective forces resulting from
changesinenvironments.Instead,theyactivelycreatethosechanges:
Thereisaconstantinterplayoftheorganismandtheenvironment,sothatalthoughnatural
selectionmaybeadaptingtheorganismtoaparticularsetofenvironmentalcircumstances,
theevolutionoftheorganismitselfchangesthosecircumstances.(215)
This article closing a special issue devoted to the “modern synthesis” of genetics
and natural selection was in fact part of a broad intellectual movement in the late
1970s that began to question certain aspects of that very synthesis—a movement
thatinsistedupontheimportanceofinteractionbetweenorganismandenvironment
during ontogeny, or the lifetime of the organism (e.g., Gould 1977; Lewin 1980;
Bonner1982).
Muchoftherecentinterestamongbiologistsindifferentmodelsoftheinteraction
of organism and environment can be traced back to the new perspectives that
emergedinthisperiod.Evolutionary-developmentalbiology,or“evo-devo,”isnow
a hot topic. Evo-devo has a complex intellectual history going back at least to the
nineteenthcentury,butmanyhistoriansandpractitionersseethemodernresurgence
of interest in development as a response to the late-1970s critique of the modern
synthesis by Lewontin and others (Laubichler 2007; Mu¨ller 2007; Wagner 2007;
fordeeperroots,seeRaffandLove2004;Amundson2005;andtheotherchapters
inLaubichlerandMaienschein2007).Byopeninguptheblackboxintowhichthe
modern synthesis placed ontogenetic processes, evo-devo explores the interaction
oforganismandenvironmentatdevelopmentalratherthanevolutionarytimescales.
Lewontin’spointaboutorganismsmodifyingtheirenvironmentsinspiredanother
recent research program in biology even more directly—niche construction. In
“Niche-Constructing Phenotypes,” the first outline of this approach, John Odling-
Smee followed Lewontin in criticizing the modern synthesis for holding “au-
tonomouseventsintheenvironment ::: tobeexclusivelyresponsiblefordirecting
the course of evolution down nonrandom paths” (1988, 75). Odling-Smee went
on tosuggest that theorganism-environment relationship—and adaptation itself—
involvesatleasttwoprocesses:
Instead of natural selection’s causing organisms to adapt to their environments, ::: the
constructiveactivitiesofphenotypescouldcausetheirenvironmentstobecomeadaptiveto
themselves.Moreplausibly, ::: theadaptivefitbetweenorganismsandtheirenvironments
couldbecausedbybothoftheseprocessesactingtogether.(77)
This idea of niche construction, and the related notion of ecosystem engineering,
openedupnewresearchdirectionsinbiology(Odling-Smeeetal.2003;Cuddington
et al. 2007), and the resultant models of the relation between organism and
environment have been extensively discussed by philosophers (Godfrey-Smith
2000,2001;Sterelny2001,2005;Okasha2005;Griffiths2005;Barker2008;Pearce
2011a).
But despite the burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of
the organism-environment dyad by biologists and philosophers, little attention
has been paid in the resulting discussions to the history of these ideas and to
their deployment in disciplines outside biology—especially in the social sciences.
Introduction:PerspectivesonEntangledLife 3
Even in biology and philosophy, there is a lack of detailed conceptual models
of the organism-environment relationship. This volume is designed to fill these
lacunaebyprovidingthefirstmultidisciplinarydiscussionofthetopicoforganism-
environment interaction.1 It brings together scholars from history, philosophy,
psychology, anthropology, medicine, and biology to discuss the common focus of
their work: entangled life, or the complex interaction of organisms and environ-
ments.
This multidisciplinary approach is important for at least two reasons. First,
it has the potential to reveal historical connections that are not apparent from
the perspective of a single modern discipline. For example, when the notion of
organismandenvironmentasaninteractingsystemwasfirstarticulatedinthelate
nineteenth century, biology, psychology, and philosophy were much less isolated
from one another than they are now (and certainly less so than they were in the
1970s).Historicalinvestigationmaythushelpusrecoverthesetofinterdisciplinary
problems to which the organism-environment framework was originally applied,
and give us new ways of thinking about today’s analogous problems. These
rootsandramificationsoftheconceptoforganism-environmentinteractioncanbe
tracedthroughvarioushistoricalperiods.Inthe1960s,notably,researchersinboth
psychology and anthropology independently championed “ecological” approaches
totheirrespectivesciences:ecologicalpsychologyandculturalecologywereboth
studying humans interacting with their environments, albeit at different levels of
organization(Geertz1963;Gibson1966;Barker1968;Rappaport1968).Histories
canconnectdisciplines,andconnectingdisciplinescaninturnenrichourhistories.
Second, bringing researchers from different disciplines together fosters both
collaboration and cross-fertilization. As Alan Love has argued, multidisciplinary
research is prompted by “complex problem domains that elude scientific expla-
nations arising from specific disciplinary approaches” (2008, 876; cf. Mitchell
2009). When phenomena are complex—and the interaction of organisms and
environments surely qualifies—the theories and techniques of individual sciences
tendtobeinadequatetothechallengesofdescribing,explaining,andinterveningon
thosephenomena.Whenmethodsandconceptsdevelopedindifferentdisciplinary
contextsarecombined,however,suchdifficultiesmaybemetmoresuccessfully:a
diversityoftoolsmakesproblemsmoretractable.Philosophershavealsoarguedthat
includingavarietyofperspectivestendstoimprovetheresultsofscientificinquiry,
sinceitexpandstherangeofpossibleinterpretationsofandapproachestoparticular
problem areas (Wylie 1992; Okruhlik 1994; Longino 2002). (There is reason to
supposethatthismightbeespeciallytruefortopics—suchasorganism-environment
interaction—thataredeeplyinterwovenwithvaluesandassumptionsabouthuman
1Itcollectsseveralpaperspresentedinthe“Organism-EnvironmentInteraction:Past,Present,and
Future” section of the Integrating Complexity: Environment and History conference at Western
University, 7–10 October 2010. The conference was the off-year workshop of the International
SocietyfortheHistory,Philosophy,andSocialStudiesofBiology,andwasfundedbytheRotman
InstituteofPhilosophyandtheSocialSciencesandHumanitiesResearchCouncilofCanada.For
abriefreportoftheconference,seePearce(2011b).