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Environment as Abstraction

  • Thematic Issue Article: Conceptualizing the Environment in Natural Sciences
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Abstract

The concept of the environment appears to be indispensably involved in adaptive explanation. Quite what its role is, however, is a matter of some dispute. The environment is customarily viewed as the dual of the organism; a wholly external, discrete, autonomous cause of evolution. On this view, the external environment is the principal cause of the adaptedness of form, and the determinant of what it is to be an adaptation. I argue that this conception of the environment neither adequately explains nor individuates evolutionary adaptations. Instead, adaptation, properly construed, is an evolutionary response to affordances. The environment, traditionally construed, underdetermines an organism’s affordances. Instead, I argue that the environment takes its place in evolutionary models not as a discrete causal entity, but as an abstraction.

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Notes

  1. See for example Godfrey-Godfrey-Smith (2001) and Lewontin (2002). Tim Lewens (2009) gives an insightful guide to various ways in which the concept of an adaptation may figure in evolutionary explanation.

  2. Trevor Pearce (2010) beautifully documents the emergence of this conception of the environment.

  3. This suggestion was first made in Walsh (2015). This article develops the argument adumbrated there.

  4. More recent contributions include Abrams (2014), Glymour (2011), and Rosenberg and Bouchard (2004). As I shall argue, below, the confusions concerning the role of the environment still persist.

  5. The types may be gene types or trait types. Note the constancy of the environment does not entail that it is homogeneous.

  6. For another example of the concept of the environment used in this way see Burian (1992).

  7. Similarly, Glymour (2011) argues, quite convincingly, that for certain purposes certain causally relevant features of the environment must be explicitly represented in our models.

  8. See also Gildenhuys (2014).

  9. Andrew Buskell (2019) has a helpful discussion of two grades of reciprocal causation. I thank an anonymous referee from this journal for making a helpful suggestion here.

  10. The example is taken from Sultan (2015).

  11. An organism’s internal features, structures, capacities, are relevant to the determination of its conditions too. An organism’s metabolic, immune, or endocrine state constitutes part of its experienced conditions.

  12. I thank Lynn Chiu for pressing this point.

  13. Contexts may here be environmental contexts, or the context provided other traits that an individual organism may possess.

  14. A somewhat similar argument is made by Grant Ramsey (2006) in support of the idea that the fitness of an organism ("block fitness") should be coarse-grained.

  15. But I do not agree with Glymour that the need to incorporate the environment in models salvages the concept of adaptation as adaptation to the environment.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Gaëlle Pontarotti and Antoine Corriveau-Dussault, and the audience at IHPST, Paris. I am grateful for the assistance of two anonymous referees from this journal.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Denis Walsh

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Correspondence to Denis Walsh.

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Walsh, D. Environment as Abstraction. Biol Theory 17, 68–79 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-020-00367-2

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