Jan Baedke, Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, Guido I. Prieto (2021), Biology & Philosophy 36(5), article 48 (October 2021) — DOI-10.1007/s10539-021-09815-0
Key takeaways
- Accounts of organism–environment reciprocal causation, from the early twentieth century to present niche construction theory, keep failing in two ways — merging organism and environment, and not integrating experiential with physical niche construction — and a sequential (“unrolled”) causal model that keeps an epistemic boundary between them fixes both.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-111. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Biologists and philosophers have urged evolutionary theory to take “reciprocal causation” seriously: feedback loops in which organisms change how they experience the environment or alter its physical properties, with niche construction central because it can shift selection pressures. Comparing early-twentieth-century approaches with current niche construction theory, the authors find two recurring problems: failure to keep meaningful boundaries between organism and environment, and failure to integrate experiential and physical kinds of reciprocal causation. Drawing on niche construction case studies, they offer a model that solves both, distinguishing interacting organisms and environments in complex scenarios and integrating experiential and physical niche construction.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 105 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-111 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the clearest statement of the “keep the boundary, unroll the loop” position in the niche-construction reciprocity debate, and as the natural counterpart to Hazelwood (LIT-156); its model is illustrative, not formalized or tested, and the formalization it promises is deferred to later work.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-111, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: high — the most-engaged item after LIT-141 and LIT-168, and one side of a live debate with LIT-156; the skim gives the model’s structure but not how the figures work in detail.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-111 is that reading):
- The owner’s second-highest-engagement item here (t = 105 s); cited twice, in passing, by Hazelwood (LIT-156), whose close reading of 2026-09-26 found his target is Laland and colleagues’ process-to-process claim, not this paper: he calls organism–environment reciprocal causation “unobjectionable”.
- Check whether the unrolled sequential model stays within the organism–environment sense Hazelwood accepts, as its summary suggests, or also claims that selection and niche construction cause each other, the sense he rejects.
- Relevant to agency and individuality discussions (LIT-168, LIT-157) through experienced environments.
Access when seeded: link.springer.com blocks automated fetches (client challenge) and the OA PDF link fails the same way; the full open-access (CC BY) article HTML was read from a Wayback snapshot (2026-01-20) of the Springer page, by section. Online date from Crossref.