Abstract
In this article, I consider the term “environment” in various claims and models by evolutionists and ecologists. I ask whether “environment” is amenable to a philosophical explication, in the same way some key terms of evolutionary theorizing such as “fitness,” “species,” or more recently “population” have been. I will claim that it cannot. In the first section, I propose a typology of theoretical terms, according to whether they are univocal or equivocal, and whether they have been the object of formal or conceptual attempts of clarification. “Environment” will appear to be in a position similar to “population,” yet almost no extant attempt has been made to make sense of its meaning and reference. In the second section, I will present several theoretical claims or issues that refer to “environment” in apparently very diverse ways, but always supposing a contrastive term, which is not always the same. The third section directly considers models in evolution and in ecology, and asks “where” in them is the environment term. The fourth section proposes that “environment” refers to a distinction between a varying and an invariant term, but shows that this does not exhaust its meaning, which requires making more conceptual differences. Then, I take on the suggestion that there might be two “environment” terms, one in ecology and one in evolution, but show that is not the case. Finally I center on the specific notion of “complex environment,” which is the object of several research programs, and propose a typology of “complex environments” across theories.
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Notes
Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/content/b5f10c6e-68c3-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614.
See Dussault (2020; this issue).
And see the general theory of replicator’s dynamics which is used in these models in Hofbauer and Sigmund (1998).
Of course this doesn’t exhaust all models in behavioral ecology or game-theoretical behavioral ecology. My point consists in giving an idea of how the “environment” term works across models, even though I don’t have room to analyze all types of models in each discipline; I just intend to give a sense of the diversity of these roles.
“Islands” is a theoretical and not a geographical term; any territory lacking communication avenues for organisms with other territories is an “island.”
For the context of the elaboration of this concept in the concluding remarks of the Cold Spring Harbor 1957 symposium on population biology, which hosted an important controversy between proponents of a density-dependent regulation of abundances, and of density-independent regulation, see Huneman (2019). Hutchinson’s niche is a sophisticated concept, and one can argue that besides the canonical reading I present here, Hutchinson in some contexts integrated elements from the geographical space (Colwell and Rangel 2009).
This is how Hutchinson explains the “paradox of the plankton,” namely the fact that there exist many more plankton species than expected on the basis of the sole competitive exclusion principle (Hutchinson 1961).
Even if the position is contested and should be mitigated (Rodriguez-Cabal et al. 2012).
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Huneman, P. What Is It Like To Be an Environment? A Semantic and Epistemological Inquiry. Biol Theory 17, 94–112 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-021-00390-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-021-00390-x