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Natural artificiality, niche construction, and the content-open mediation of human behavior

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Abstract

There are at least two senses in which human beings can be called “naturally artificial”: (1) being adapted for creation of and participation in niche constructed environments, and (2) being adapted for creation of and participation in such environments despite an exceptional indeterminacy in the details of the niche constructed environments themselves. The former puts human beings in a common category with many niche-constructing organisms while the latter is arguably distinctive of our species. I explain how this can be so by developing an account of supporting concepts of complexity, contingency, and content-openness, and show how to defend the position against a common style of objection by a single comparative case study: hermit crabs and their shells versus humans and their movable dwellings. Finally, I consider evidence that such a feature is indeed species-typical and evolved in human populations.

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Notes

  1. Grene borrowed the term and concept of “natural artificiality” from the 20th-century philosopher Helmuth Plessner (2019 [1928]), who employed it in a more phenomenological register (having to do with the experience of life as a human being). I rely solely on Grene’s version of the concept here.

  2. I do briefly and in passing discuss the empirical reasons for believing that natural artificiality is a species-typical and evolved feature of Homo sapiens, and some of the possible evolutionary routes by which it could become entrenched in human populations, but I leave a fuller treatment of both of these issues for another occasion.

  3. The notion of what is “natural” for a species—that is, what is “natural” in the sense of species-typical—has been the source of much controversy (e.g. Mayr 1959 [1976], Hull 1986, Grene 1990), including some influential recent defenses (Machary 2008; Kronfeldner 2018). In accordance with the recent defenses, I assume here that a notion of “natural” as species-typical is defensible and analytically feasible. In the interest of full-precision, however, one would need to distinguish between concepts such as species-typicality (which itself carries some vagueness and ambiguity), (biological) evolvedness, and evolvedness by natural selection. Not everything that is species-typical is necessarily a product of biological evolution; and not everything that is a product of biological evolution is a product of natural selection. See Lewontin & Gould 1978 for the classic objections to assuming overlaps here.

  4. By a prima facie feature I mean one that shows up for a reasonable but relatively pre-theoretical inquiry—that is, for an inquiry that seeks merely to capture how things appear when one attempts to observe and think about them in a reasonable and unbiased way, a way not guided by one or another “strong theory” that would pull one’s conclusions on the basis of observation in a highly contestable or controversial direction. The reliability of such a method is, of course, limited. That’s why I describe it as a “first pass” step in the argument: not an established or argued-for result, but a prima facie plausible view, to be refined and more carefully defended thereafter.

  5. One might also consider “species-typical development,” but I leave that aside for now. I discuss developmental dimensions of the same phenomenon to some extent in the section "Content-open natural artificiality and human evolution" below.

  6. By an “artifact” I mean “a relatively stable modification of an environment by a conspecific.” This definition equates “artifact” with any “niche-constructed” (in the sense of Odling-Smee et al. 2003) part or feature of an environment, with the additional requirement that only those modifications produced by an organism or its conspecifics can be artifacts for that organism.

  7. My aim here is just to note three couplings that exhibit the emphasized pattern. The association I draw between these physiological features and these constructed environmental components is not intended to be exclusive of other possible couplings. For instance: By mentioning the “voice” I do not mean to distinctly associate human linguistic ability with vocalization, just as I don’t mean to suggest that the only possible mediation of human behavior by tools occurs in conjunction with use of the hands. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising a question about these issues.).

  8. This notion of a coupling between human physiology and especially variable niche-constructed environments is implied in some previous accounts, for instance, Sterelny 2003. Historically informed readers may note a similarity to the classic trope of humans as Mangelwesen (“deficient beings”), traceable to the 18th-century anthropologist-philosopher J.G. Herder if not earlier; and the sometimes-made suggestion that a variable set of tools “supplements” this human physiological indeterminateness (e.g. Alsberg 1922 [1970]). For discussion of the Mangelwesen thesis in a contemporary biological context, see Moss (2015, 2020).

  9. Odling-Smee et al. (2003, 255) make a similar point about the structural parallels between constructed niches and the adaptive immune system.

  10. The extent of this increase will vary across cases. In some cases artifactual factors may produce decreases in content-openness (for instance, if an artifact restricts the range of possible interactions with an environment—e.g., a jail cell).

  11. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting these cases as ones to be treated here.

  12. These others might be called cases of “non-natural artificiality.” Note, however, that the use of eyeglasses can still be read as exemplifying a “natural artificiality” characteristic of human beings as a whole because eyeglasses are produced and used through the operation of these other, “natural artificiality”-supporting physiological systems (i.e. the hands and brain). The extended case study of human natural artificiality considered later in the paper should be read in this way.

  13. Godfrey-Smith’s “heterogeneity” definition of complexity seems to include this dimension of variability (1996, 24–25), but doesn’t analyze its structure and relation to other aspects of complexity as thoroughly as I do here.

  14. For “degrees of freedom” in biological contexts, see Moss 2013; for plasticity, see West-Eberhard 2003.

  15. Note that a greater dimension degree of freedom could, in principle, be treated as itself a variation in the range degree of freedom of one variable describing the system, namely, the presence or absence of various subsystems (themselves also varying), though this would involve allowing some ranges to take other ranges as values—that is, the system would be given a “multi-order” description.

  16. One might think that, as far as behavior is concerned, the set of distinct states along any one dimension ought in principle to be finite and discrete since there’s a minimum difference in environmental cues reacted to, or actions carried out. However, loose coupling between organism and environmental conditions makes it so that even these minimum differences may vary across different times and contexts, and due to variation in a population, this minimum difference can vary also between organisms of the same species. The size of this “quantum of difference” for any given organism’s behavior will for these reasons and others be difficult to determine with certainty. I think it’s better to allow some dimensions to be treated as varying continuously.

  17. Laidre 2012, 2019; Laidre et al. 2012; Laidre & Trinh 2014; Bates & Laidre 2018.

  18. Laidre 2012, 38–39; Laidre et al. 2012, 3575.

  19. Laidre et al. 2012.

  20. Laidre 2019; Laidre & Trinh 2014.

  21. Bates & Laidre 2019, Laidre 2019.

  22. The crabs greatly prefer previously modified over previously unmodified shells (Laidre 2019, Laidre & Trinh 2014).

  23. On the range and average number of crabs in these gatherings, see Laidre 2019.

  24. Some quantitative measures of these dimensions are given in Laidre 2012.

  25. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 3–13; Holley 2007, 1–30; Hungrywolf 2006.

  26. The strengths of Laubin & Laubin’s treatment include its origins in training from native practitioners (particularly Chief One Bull and Scarlet Whirlwind), its technical detail, and its apparent consistency with more recent accounts such as Holley 2007 and Hungrywolf 2006.

  27. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 206.

  28. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 104.

  29. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 51.

  30. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 182.

  31. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 19–23.

  32. As with the question of the species of gastropod from which crabs take their shells, we might drop (d) and focus instead on the “differences that make a difference” (that is, the other dimensions listed).

  33. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 16–17, 279–231. With the exception of substituting "Lakota" for "Sioux," I follow Laubin & Laubin’s names for these groups without being confident these are the most appropriate choices from a contemporary standpoint. Because I cannot guarantee that alternative names would designate all and only the groups that Laubin & Laubin intended to designate with their terms, I have elected to leave them as they are, with apologies for any confusions or offense that may arise.

  34. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 8–9.

  35. Laubin & Laubin 1977; Holley 2007.

  36. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 45–50.

  37. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 241–255.

  38. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 61.

  39. Laubin & Laubin 1977, 63–88, and the rest of Ch. 5.

  40. Laubin & Laubin 1977, Ch. 7.

  41. Including this dimension of variation—and the associated high degree of contingency—in our comparison would raise the estimate of the content-openness in the human case far beyond that of the crabs almost so obviously as to make the rest of the comparative analysis superfluous.

  42. As noted, the estimate of this contingency is increased further when we consider that tipis are just one type of human dwelling among many.

  43. For instances of this supportive human physiology and pattern of development, consider the hands, the plasticity of the neo-cortex, and adaptations for social learning such as joint attention (Tomasello 2000, 2014) or “apprentice learning” (Sterelny 2012).

  44. The argument of the remainder of this section owes much to Boyd & Richerson (1985, 81–131; 2006, 99–147), Odling-Smee et al. (2003, 354–359), and Sterelny 2012, though my account does not necessarily match any of theirs in all details. See also Snell-Rood 2013 on evolutionary trade-offs in connection with behavioral plasticity.

  45. Boyd & Richerson 2006, 131–147 conjecture that such a moderately-paced change of environment could have resulted from rapid climatic cycling during this time. Moderate rates of environmental change could also have been introduced by the increased migration enabled by achievement of full bipedality roughly 1.9 mya, as emphasized by Tattersall 2008. Niche construction itself can also speed up or slow down the rate of change of environments (as analyzed by Odling-Smee et al. 2003), a phenomenon that, once it had emerged, could have allowed the speed of change of environments to be often enough at the right point to select for further capacity for social learning.

  46. The delay of post-Acheulian technical sophistication until roughly 0.5 mya, however, and no clear and consistent evidence of symbolic cognition until 80,000 ya at the earliest, are admittedly hard to explain on the favored hypothesis. See Sterelny 2011, 2012, 2017 on this puzzle about “behavioral modernity.”.

  47. I thank the following institutions for opportunities to present drafts of this paper or parts of this paper: the Philosophy of Biology Circle, hosted by Sahotra Sarkar at the University of Texas, Austin; the Philosophy Colloquium of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; and the undergraduate chapter of Phi Sigma Tau and philosophy club at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I also thank the following individuals for helpful comments or conversations: Ian Dove, Celene Fuller, Todd Jones, Kaeley Loskutoff, Lenny Moss, William Ramsey, James Spady, Stefen Starner, and two anonymous readers for the journal. My apologies for any omissions from this list. All errors are my own. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Margolis (1927–2021), who first introduced me to the phrase “natural artificiality” and the work of Marjorie Grene.

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    Phillip Honenberger

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Honenberger, P. Natural artificiality, niche construction, and the content-open mediation of human behavior. Biol Philos 36, 55 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-021-09825-y

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