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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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The Extended Phenotype A powerful metaphor to
express the dependence of an organism on its environment, and the fact that the
organism does not make sense without its environment, has been introduced by
the British biologist Richard Dawkins: the "extended phenotype" includes the world an organism interacts with. The organism alone (the
phenotype) does not have biological relevance. What makes sense is an open
system made of the organism and its neighbors. For example, a cobweb is still
part of the spider. The control of an organism is never complete inside and
null outside: there is rather a continuum of degrees of control, which allows
partiality of control inside (e.g., parasites operate on the nervous system of
their hosts) and an extension of control outside (as in the cobweb). To some extent
the very genome of a species can be viewed as a representation of the
environment inside the cell.
Conversely, within the boundaries of an organism there can be more than
one psychology (as in the case of schizophrenics). The US philosopher Ruth Millikanwent further claiming that,
when determining the function of a biological "system", the
"system" must include more than just the organism, something that
extends beyond its skin. Furthermore, the system often needs the cooperation of
other systems: the immune system can only operate if it is attacked by
viruses. An organism is only a part of
a larger biological system. Tools (whether cobwebs or
buckets or cars) are an extension of the organism which serve a specific
purpose. Buckets store water. Cars help us move faster. Computers are an
extension of the organism that serve the purpose of simulating a person or even
an entire world. No matter how simple or how complex, those tools are an
extension of our organism. The model of the extended
phenotype is consistent with a theory advanced by the US biologist Richard
Lewontin. Each organism is the
subject of continuous development throughout its life. And such development is
driven by mutually interacting genes and environment. Genes per se cannot
determine the phenotype, abilities or tendencies. The organism is both the
subject and the object of evolution.
Organisms construct environments that are the conditions for their own
further evolution and for the evolutions of nature itself towards new
environments. Organism and environment
mutually specify each other. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Ecological Realism: The Embodied Mind" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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