Making an environment 91
Notes
1 Most of the controversy between Gould, Lewontin, Vrba and their main opponents
(Dawkins 1999, Chapter 3; Dennett 1995, Chapter 10) does not concern whether phenomena such as spandrels and exaptations actually exist but what implications their
admission to evolutionary processes has: do they invalidate or only require us to
amend the hypothesis that adaptation by natural selection is the key to evolutionary
explanations?
2 The distinction at issue here is not entirely unlike the ontological distinction in the social
studies of science between the construction of artefacts and the social construction of
institutions, such as marriage, money or courts, as “realities created by references to
them” (Bloor 1996, 842). The difference, of course, is that the latter realities are created
in the course of shared linguistic practice, and thus on a higher level of informational
complexity.
3 A similar point is made by Sterelny and Griffiths (1999, 269) who note in their discussion of Brandon (1995) that it is an empirical truth that organisms may modify their
external environments, whereas it is a conceptual truth that they modify their ecological
and selective environments. These latter kinds of environment are always determined in
relation to the organism – by definition, as it were.
Notes
1 Most of the controversy between Gould, Lewontin, Vrba and their main opponents
(Dawkins 1999, Chapter 3; Dennett 1995, Chapter 10) does not concern whether phenomena such as spandrels and exaptations actually exist but what implications their
admission to evolutionary processes has: do they invalidate or only require us to
amend the hypothesis that adaptation by natural selection is the key to evolutionary
explanations?
2 The distinction at issue here is not entirely unlike the ontological distinction in the social
studies of science between the construction of artefacts and the social construction of
institutions, such as marriage, money or courts, as “realities created by references to
them” (Bloor 1996, 842). The difference, of course, is that the latter realities are created
in the course of shared linguistic practice, and thus on a higher level of informational
complexity.
3 A similar point is made by Sterelny and Griffiths (1999, 269) who note in their discussion of Brandon (1995) that it is an empirical truth that organisms may modify their
external environments, whereas it is a conceptual truth that they modify their ecological
and selective environments. These latter kinds of environment are always determined in
relation to the organism – by definition, as it were.