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The evolutionary role of affordances: ecological psychology, niche construction, and natural selection

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Abstract

This paper aims to examine the evolutionary role of affordances, that is, the possibilities for action available in our environments. There are two allegedly competing views for explaining the evolutionary role of affordances: the first is based on natural selection; the second is based on niche construction. According to the first, affordances are resources that exert selection pressure. The second view claims that affordances are ecological inheritances in the organism’s niche that are the product of a previous alteration of the environment. While there seems to be a mutually exclusive definition of affordances in each of these views, I argue in this paper that the views are not competing but, rather, complementary. In this sense, affordances play the role of either resources or ecological inheritances depending on the temporal stage of the evolutionary process. I make this argument by analyzing how natural selection and niche construction affect each other even when they function independently from each other. In this light, if these two evolutionary mechanisms exert their power in parallel but at two different stages in the evolutionary history of a given econiche, then there is room to claim that affordances can be understood as both resources and ecological inheritances. This dual aspect of affordances shows their evolutionary role.

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Notes

  1. A further analysis on the principles of ecological psychology will be offered in "Ecological psychology and affordances" section.

  2. Walsh proposes an affordance landscape in which the environment is shifting with changes in the organismal form (a symmetrical view in which both aspects affect each other) as opposed to an environment in which the organism is a passive subject constantly affected by natural selection (an asymmetrical view in which only the environment affects the organism). Walsh (2014) also claims that niche construction endorses a view of the environment that aligns with the latter view rather than with the former. However, the idea of the affordance landscape that he offers has been proposed to be compatible with niche construction theory, because niche construction theory holds that “organism and environment reciprocally affect each other in their mutual development, and those affections are always determined by the previous ones, which makes every interaction constitutive or formative of the following affection” (Heras-Escribano and De Pinedo-García 2018: 12). For a further discussion of the compatibility of Walsh’s affordance landscape and niche construction theory, see Heras-Escribano and De Pinedo-García (2018).

  3. I thank an anonymous reviewer for urging me to comment upon this idea.

  4. The gene-centered view is understood here as centered on individual genes as opposed to genomes or whole organism phenotypes. This view is compatible with Dawkins’s view of organisms as survival machines of genes, as well as with orthodox views in the Modern Synthesis cited above. To show the intricacies of the idea and its relation to phenotypic variation, I offer a comparison of niche construction within the Extended Synthesis and Dawkins’s extended phenotype within the Modern Synthesis at the end of this section. I thank an anonymous reviewer for urging me to clarify this idea here.

  5. It should be highlighted that not all alterations in the environment produced by the organism are goal-directed and adaptive. Dairy farming in humans is clearly a goal-directed action, but the emission of detritus in populations of squirrels is not necessarily a goal-directed action. Despite this difference, the alterations of both inceptive perturbations can produce an equally significant alteration in their particular ecosystems. The same goes for the adaptive role: not all such alterations are beneficial in adaptive terms, although they equally change the evolutionary dynamics even without an adaptive impact. In this sense, I focus here on affordance perception and affordance taking as an example of goal-directed action, but not all aspects of niche construction processes involve this kind of aspect. I thank an anonymous reviewer for inviting me to highlight this point.

  6. As suggested by an anonymous reviewer, it is worth highlighting that niche construction theory applies to all organisms, including those that are not traditionally conceived as perceivers (though they do detect things), behavers (in most senses of the term), or fast (animated) movers. This is important to avoid equating the words “organism” and “cognizer” and giving the false impression that niche construction processes are only triggered by cognitive organisms. In the case of chordates, action capacities are well-developed so as to act in a fast way and develop a certain plasticity and flexibility that increase their cognitive capacities (Settleworth 2010), and niche construction processes are triggered thanks to these capacities. In this sense, organisms that do not possess these capacities are also capable of producing alterations in their environments, which trigger niche construction processes (Odling-Smee et al. 2003). Nevertheless, there are also organisms that are usually categorized as non-cognitive but, as recent empirical studies prove, show cognitive capacities in ecological terms, as happens in the field of plant cognition, which is gaining momentum in the cognitive sciences (see, for example, Heras-Escribano and Calvo 2019).

  7. Based on how it is written, it might seem that a greater capacity for social sharing of information is always advantageous. However, sometimes it is not, since such capacities also carry costs that vary according to the ecological situation of the organism. I thank an anonymous reviewer for asking me to point this idea out.

  8. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for making me aware of this idea.

  9. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to comment this idea.

  10. An anonymous reviewer urges me to explain Reed’s emphasis on the idea of resources in his approach to affordances. Reed defines affordances as resources for behavior in his book Encountering the World. The idea of resource plays a key role in the definition of affordance, and it is defined as an environmental aspect that exerts selective pressure and that gives an evolutionary advantage to the organisms that take them. The author does not refer to a particular tradition or author in the literature on evolutionary biology from which he takes the concept. As the anonymous reviewer claims, a justification this paper’s recourse to Reed’s idiosyncratic way of thinking must be provided. The reason is primarily that Reed’s contribution provides the first attempt to relate evolutionary biology and ecological psychology systematically, thereby offering a milestone in the history of ecological psychology and pioneering new paths for understanding the connection between non-representational, non-cognitivist psychology and evolutionary biology, a research line that has been deepened in the latest years (see, for example, Stotz 2014). In this sense, Reed’s understanding may be rather idiosyncratic, as the reviewer claims, but his contributions are sufficient to include his views as one key approach to take into account when discussing the relation between evolutionary biology and affordances.

  11. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for making me aware of the importance of this idea.

  12. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for inviting me to highlight this consequence.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Ezequiel Di Paolo for fruitful suggestions to an earlier version of this paper and also to Cristian Saborido, Javier González de Prado, Lorena Lobo, Víctor Luque, Donald Cross, and David Teira for their comments.

Funding

This paper has been written thanks to a 2018 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, BBVA Foundation (The Foundation accepts no responsibility for the opinions, statements and contents included in the project and/or the results thereof, which are entirely the responsibility of the authors), the Project FFI2016-80088-P funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, and the FiloLab Group of Excellence funded by the University of Granada, Spain.

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  1. Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain

    Manuel Heras-Escribano

  2. Embodied Cognitive Science Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Onna, Japan

    Manuel Heras-Escribano

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Correspondence to Manuel Heras-Escribano.

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Heras-Escribano, M. The evolutionary role of affordances: ecological psychology, niche construction, and natural selection. Biol Philos 35, 30 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09747-1

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