Source
Baedke, Fábregas-Tejeda & Prieto (2021), LIT-110 (Biology & Philosophy 36:48), read in full in NOTE-111. The figures were read from their captions and the prose walk-throughs.
What was actually shown
The diagnosis (pp. 4–12). Organism–environment reciprocity theories, from Haeckel, J.S. Haldane, Uexküll and Waddington to current niche construction theory, fail in two recurring ways: (i) organism and environment are merged, and (ii) experiential and physical reciprocal causation are not integrated. Early NCT kept the two apart but ignored experience. Later NCT influenced by developmental systems theory brought experience in and merged the relata.
The model (Figs. 2–3, pp. 13–17). Draw the loop, add causal paths within each relatum, and unroll it in time. Two ordered state series, O_n and E_n, are joined by arrows O_n → E_{n+1} and E_n → O_{n+1}. Each arrow is an interventionist dependency (Woodward 2003). An experienced-environment node Ex_n sits between E_n and O_n. A change in Ex changes the organism’s relation to its environment without changing the environment’s intrinsic properties.
Characteristic patterns (Figs. 3–4, pp. 17–19). Constitutive niche construction (a lion’s maturation changes its prey’s Ex), mediational (Arabidopsis root architecture), relational (mice piling up in a cold nest) and relocational (a break in the E-series, for migrating fish) each get a pattern. Physical niche construction is the coral case.
Integration (Fig. 5, pp. 20–23). Bumblebees damaging eggplant leaves is physical niche construction for the bee and mediational for the plant, so it needs both types and experience in one diagram. In ruminant herbivory, microbes do physical niche construction on the rumen and the host does mediational. Collapse microbe into host, as the holobiont-as-individual view does, and the case becomes indistinguishable from constitutive niche construction (p. 22).
What could have come out otherwise. A niche-construction type could have resisted representation in the diagram, or the multi-species cases could have been drawable with the relata merged. The paper reports neither. It also did not look for such cases systematically.
What this does not say
- That organism and environment are metaphysically separate. The boundary is granted “in order to” trace causes (p. 14). The model “does not develop a particular theory of biological boundaries” (fn. 5). An inseparabilist is asked to show a practice, not refuted (p. 25).
- That synchronic co-constitution is wrong. The model is diachronic and Humean by assumption (fn. 3, p. 11). Walsh’s (2021) reciprocity is reclassified as co-constitution, not answered.
- That the patterns are complete or unique. Each type was worked by example; there is no proof (NOTE-111, C5).
- That selection and niche construction cause each other. The model has no selection node. How a change in Ex alters selection pressures is named as open (p. 16). So it neither takes nor answers Hazelwood’s objection to selection-involving reciprocity (LIT-156).
- That the technique is new. Unrolling a loop into an acyclic graph is standard in causal modelling. The novelty is the application and the Ex node.
- That “experience” is analysed. Plants and microbes experience through a sensory–cue interface of “sufficient” specificity (p. 20), left unanalysed.
Connections
- Hazelwood (LIT-156, THEORY-612) calls organism–environment reciprocal causation “unobjectionable” and targets selection-involving reciprocity. Read together, the two papers suggest a division: organism–environment reciprocity, unrolled, is tractable; the metaphysical trouble lies where selection is a relatum.
- QUESTION-035 asks where a combined form’s boundary lies relative to a target. This account sets the organism–environment boundary relative to a causal narrative and gives no criterion that could come out wrong, so it does not answer the question. Its ruminant case is a constraint on any answer that would merge host and microbes.
- THEORY-249 also makes a boundary depend on a commitment from outside the system. It concerns agency, not causal apportioning.