Surrounding space
| Abstract | The history of evolution is a history of development from less to more complex organisms. This growth in complexity of organisms goes hand in hand with a concurrent growth in complexity of environments and of organism-environment relations. It is a concern with this latter aspect of evolutionary development that motivates the present paper. We develop a formal theory of organism-environment relations and we show that the theory can be applied to a range of different sorts of cases, both biological and non-biological, in which objects are lodged or housed within specific environments or niches. Where biological science is interested in types (in regularities which can serve as the basis for the formulation of laws or general principles), the framework here presented draws on the idea that types (for example genotypes, phenotypes--and niche types) exist only through their corresponding tokens. | |||||||||
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