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NATURE, MEDIA, AND KNOWLEDGE:

A TRANSDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF THE NATURE AND IMPACT OF

ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND PHILOSOPHY

by

Adam Robbert

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for a Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy

With a Concentration on Philosophy, Cosmology, and ConsciousnessIntegral

Ecology Track

California Institute of Integral Studies

San Francisco, CA

2011


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CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read NATURE, MEDIA, AND KNOWLEDGE:

A TRANSDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF THE NATURE AND IMPACT OF

ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND PHILOSOPHY,and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesissubmitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree

in Philosophy, with a Concentration on Philosophy, Cosmology, andConsciousness, Integral Ecology Track, at the California Institute

of Integral Studies.

___________________________________________________

Brian Swimme, Ph.D., Chair

___________________________________________________

Sean Kelly, [Professor / Program Director / Faculty], Philosophy, Cosmology, and

consciousness

___________________________________________________[committee members name, committee members academic degree]

[Professor / Program Director / Faculty] [CIIS program name]


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Adam Robbert 2011


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iv

Adam RobbertCalifornia Institute of Integral Studies, 2011

Brian Swimme, Ph.D., Committee Chair

NATURE, MEDIA, AND KNOWLEDGE: A TRANSDISCIPLINARY STUDY

ON THE NATURE AND IMPACT OF ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN

SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND PHILOSOPHY

ABSTRACT

Ecology is typically defined as the study of the relationship between

organisms and environments. Although this definition is true as far as it goes, the

organism-environment relationship remains inadequately understood when

approached only from a singular, disciplinary specialization. Contemporary

approaches to ecology tend to emphasize either a holistic, systems-oriented

approach to ecology, or a reductionist, evolutionary paradigm of ecological

inquiry. Historically, both have failed to address the role of human agency in the

field of ecology as a whole. By this I mean that human scientists, in an attempt to

maintain scientific objectivity, have failed to consider that their own worldviews,

as well as their political and technical practices, inevitably affect the ecological

perspectives they develop. Human beings participate in the ongoing evolution of

ecological communities on planet Earth; in many respects we are a major

transformative element within those ecological communities.

Because human beings are always in relation toand transformthe

ecologies they study, an integral and transdisciplinary method of practicing

ecology that takes this fact into account must be articulated. In this thesis I argue

that such an approach entails introducing a threefold, interdependent system of


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ecological study: a natural ecology, a media ecology, and a knowledge ecology.

The following pages explicate the reasoning for this threefold delineation, as well

as its necessity within current practices of ecological research that, as will be

demonstrated, have significant implications for other fields of inquiry spanning

the natural sciences, cultural theory, and philosophy.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................iv

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 1

Outline ..............................................................................................................8

Chapter 1.............................................................................................................11

tyThe Threefold Structure...................................................................................11

Chapter 2.............................................................................................................18

The Ecology of Paradigms..................................................................................18

Chapter 3.............................................................................................................29

Politics and Paradigms in the History of Ecology .............................................. 29

History of Evolution ....................................................................................... 29

History of Ecology..........................................................................................45

Evolution and System Towards an Integrative Natural Ecology....................56

Chapter 4.............................................................................................................62

Dialectical Biology, Autopoiesis, and Niche construction Theory .................... 62

Evolution as Dialectical Biology ....................................................................64

Evolution as Autopoiesis ................................................................................ 70Evolution as Niche Construction ....................................................................79

NCT in Search of a Human Ecology ..............................................................83

Chapter 5.............................................................................................................91

Actor-Networks and Media Ecologies: Stabilizing Situated Objectivity ...........91

Actor-Network Theory ................................................................................... 91

Media Ecology................................................................................................95

Chapter 6...........................................................................................................100

Conclusion ........................................................................................................100

Ecologies of Knowledge: Patience and Risk in Staying With the World.....100

References.........................................................................................................110


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INTRODUCTION

Nature, culture, and knowledge are collectively assembled elements of a complex

and shifting mosaic. Intrinsically relative, these three elements, I argue, are mutually

enacting and inseparable. The concept of Nature is inevitably an abstract construction,

a horizon upon which cultural-scientific modes of knowledge organize highly specific

elements of a more complex reality. Nature is organizationally open in an observer-

dependent way. Likewise, culture and science do not simply construct a vision of

Nature that is absent of historical and ecological contingencies. The nave empiricism of

the positivist philosopheralongside the equally impoverished idea of the social

construction of Natureis, in the context of a twenty-first century ecological science,

inadequate.

In the domain of contemporary ecological science, I argue, a new and more

integrative framework that coimplicates nature, culture, and knowledge into a complex

and interdependent whole is emerging. The field ofecology, since the term was coined by

Ernst Haeckel in 1866, has transitioned into a new phase of its paradigmatic

development. Those concerned with this emergent phase must study not only the

relationships between organisms and environments, but also the complex

interconnections between socioeconomic, cultural, and paradigmatic dimensions that

inhere in ecological sciences. In this new understanding, the science of ecology is a

collectively enactedsystem of study that draws in biological and ecological components,

alongside sociopolitical systems of knowledge production, technological artifacts that

allow scientific research to take place, and the paradigmatic or epistemological

dimensions of ecological research. I maintain that this complex, recursively dynamic


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approach to ecology is transdisciplinary and requires scientific, cultural, and

philosophical disciplinary methods.

The reification of boundaries in the academy through the intensification of

disciplinary specialization has impeded the ability of researchers to account for the

degrees of subjectivity present when studying ecosystem functioning and behavior. In the

complex approach to ecology argued herein, the role of the researcher is cast not as that

of an independent observer, but as an interactive element within the ecology of research

being performed. The role of the observer as an interactive producer of knowledge

generates new possibilities in the enaction of new sets of relations based on the

subjectivity of the research worker. Knowledge, like organisms, is context dependent.

Complex approaches to ecology are sensitive to the observer-produced, and

paradigmatically maintained, boundaries of research that delineate sectors of research

into the shifting boundaries between nature, culture, and knowledge.

Drawing on the literature from the philosophy of sciencein particular Thomas

Kuhns epochal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996)I approach the history of

ecological thinking as more than simply the ever-increasing accumulation of knowledge

that reveals the true nature of independently existing ecosystems. Rather, I approach

the history and development of ecology as a mode of scientific inquiry as the history of

mutually enfolded paradigms in reciprocal exchange with the systems that they study.

The paradigm-system relationship is complex in that each enfolds the other, as will be

demonstrated. The ecology of the ecosystem meets the conceptual ecology of the

research worker, both implicated in and transforming the other. The nature of the

relationship between researcher and ecosystem is complex, but not indescribable. This


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view asserts that paradigms and their objects of researchin this case living ecological

communitiesare entangled with one another in uncertain and important ways.

Following Kuhns (1996) assessment of normal science as the practice of

scientists engaged in a process of puzzle solving using established paradigmatic

protocols, I argue that a form of postnormal science must be encouraged in the future

development of ecological knowledge (Ravetz 2004). The problems facing the scientific

establishment, and the global polity at large todaysuch as the mass extinction of

species, peak oil, asymmetries in world power, global climate change, the renewed threat

of disease pandemics, the disjuncture between global economic systems, and global

ecological systems to name but a fewall point to the need for a transition within the

scientific community.

The period marked postnormal represents the need for a shift in scientific

practices that recognizes that: We can no longer separate nature, science, and

society (Ravetz 2004, 1). Such monikers, long held as distinct categories by

philosophers and scientists alike, are no longer adequate indicators that correspond to real

ecological problems. Ecological problems of the type mentioned above make no

distinctions between nature or culture, or between organic and technological domains of

the environment.

The impact of human civilization, and of the industrialized world in particular, is

leading the charge in multiple social and environmental crises. In this sense, Nothing

can be managed in a convenient isolation; issues are mutually implicated; problems

extend across many scale levels of space and time; and uncertainties and value-loadings


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of all sorts and all degrees of severity affect data and theories alike (Funtowiczand

Ravetz 2010,para.1).

The following pages map out the possibility and validity of this idea: that there is

an ecology of knowledge, concepts, and paradigms that are mediated through, and

reciprocally infolded with, specific political and technological practices. I believe this

theoretical contribution is important because ecological sciences, at the beginning of the

twenty-first century, provide research institutions with a guiding platform to ensure the

stability of future generations in an era plagued by social inequity, war, the

overconsumption of resources, and an exponential dismantling of the biosphere.

I argue that nature, science, and society cannot be viewed apart from the systems

they study or the subjects studying the systems. As Donna Haraway suggests, we live in a

thick present, one comprised of heterogeneous elements that are variously natural,

technological, and semiotic (2003). Rather than employing the rigid categories nature

or culture to bifurcate and simplify components of a more complex ecology, Haraway

(2003), following Latour (2004), suggests the term naturecultures to describe those

ecologies that are composed of natural, technological, and semiotic elements.

To substantiate the claim that ecology is moving towards a complex integration of

culture and knowledge, I draw evidence from several disciplines. The first are scientific

in their commitments, calling upon the history of biology, current debates surrounding

evolutionary theory, and investigations into the nature and functioning of ecosystems

from the perspective of current science researchers. By articulating the situated practice

of constructing evolutionary knowledge, it becomes evident that the history of the idea of

evolution is infolded within not only the scientific study of plants and biomes, but also


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within philosophical assumptions and paradigmatic constructs, as well as political and

historical factors. It is these complex interdependencies that must be viewed in their full

entanglement through an integral approach to ecology such that biophysical knowledge

can be obtained, without losing sight of the multiple contingencies involved in the

production of scientific knowledge. I discuss, for example, whether or not Haeckels

(Bramwell 1989) pantheistic monism provided him with a metaphysical grounding to

first consider the concept of ecology, or whether Darwins (Bowler 2009) allegiance to

eighteenth century economic theory and commitments to Victorian-era cultural norms

impacted his understanding of evolutionary mechanisms.

Furthermore, speaking with specific reference to scientific knowledge, it is

important to note that a paradigm must be in place in order to articulate or describe any

phenomenon scientifically. This is to say that subjects of inquirywhether genomes or

supernovas, indigenous cultures in the Amazon, or economic measures of GDPrequire

a descriptive language supplied by a greater paradigmatic environment that groups of

researchers are informed by and are conversant in. Knowledge ecologies imply the

enaction, to use Francisco Varela and Evan Thompsons (1983) term, of specific worlds,

or better, the enaction of specific characteristics of specific worlds.

In this sense, paradigms themselves are crucial subjects of study in understanding

evolutionary theory. Taken in conjunction with their subjects of study (such as specific

ecosystems or species in this case), and the technological and political conditions of the

time, paradigmatic influences can arguably be seen as participants in the enactment of

their objects of study. Paradigms, and by extension the metaphors scientists use to

express the findings of their research, form an interactive ecology in their own right. For


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example, when Eugene Odum and Todd Odum (Kingsland 2005) set out to articulate

their paradigm for ecosystems ecology in the midtwentieth century, it is nontrivial to note

the differences in their use of metaphors. Organismic metaphors dominated Eugenes

explanatory landscape, while Todds insights into cybernetic theory and technology

inspired him to use the image of the self-regulating machine to describe ecosystem

functions.

Other sources of evidence are more philosophical in tone and investigate the

history, philosophy, and functioning of science from the perspective of related concepts:

the paradigm of complexity, situated knowledges, the actor-network, and media ecology.

Though diverse in character, function, and discipline, these concepts share the common

assumption that knowledge, in order to be comprehensible to someone or to some culture,

must correspond to a network or ecology within which that item of knowledge can be

comprehended and cultivated. In this sense an ecology of knowledge or of culture is

similar to a natural ecology in that, just as organisms require access to specific ecological

environments to develop and thrive, so does knowledge require certain prereflective,

cognitive environments that support the development of certain kinds of ideas.

Reiterating the importance of context and contingency is central. Again, ecology

is not here described as a system of scientific practice that occurs in a pure space of

objective knowledge production. Rather, scientific knowledge in this context is viewed

as an entangled structure tied to deeper, generally unconscious motifs operating in certain

historical periods. Thus for Carl Linnaeus, William Paley, or Charles Lyell, for example,

science was coupled to a practice of natural theology, a belief that a deepened scientific

study of nature would reveal the inner workings of the mind of God (Bowler 2009).


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Conversely, at the end of the twentieth century and at the start of the new millennium,

science and evolution are at the forefront of an ideological project that denies Gods

existence or participation in the world. Noting deeper metaphysical commitments is

essential to understanding how scientific knowledge, in a particular time and place, acts.

Rather than simply study knowledge in terms of a true/false binary, a complex approach

to ecology emphasizes the effects or ecological impact of knowledge as expressed

through history and mediated by cultural and technological practices.

Similarly, political and economic regimes are productive of the technologies that

are indispensible to scientific practice. This media ecology, or the study of

communicative and technological artifacts as environments, is essential in articulating the

type of knowledge that it is possible to produce at any given time. The science of

genomics, for example, involves the coordination of distributed networks of high-speed

computing technologies, biotech funding, a sophisticated knowledge of evolutionary

dynamics, and hundreds of educated research teams. Each of these components is

essential in the production of genetic knowledge. In the absence of any of these

componentswhich are variously natural (the organism of study), cultural (the

technologies and economies), and knowledge-based (the training, education, and

paradigmatic infrastructure)no knowledge of genetics is possible. My argument is that,

alongside the natural ecology, there is also a media ecology and a knowledge ecology.

Each of these three ecologies can be viewed as subsets of a more complex and integrative

ecology. These three ecologies, I argue, are essential for the emergence of advanced

scientific, ecological knowledge.


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By bringing these two larger domains into conversationthe history of science as

a practice of problem solving andthe study of the paradigmatic and ideological traces

that inform scientific practicean adequate method is available to explore this terrain.

Because such a research project is necessarily dense and transdisciplinary, a brief outline

of the project will help orient the reader toward what is to come.

Outline

Chapter 1 briefly describes theorists who have also employed a threefold

approach to the study of ecology. I highlight the work of Alf Hornborg (2001), Felix

Guatarri (2008), and Edgar Morin (2008) because each has made significant contributions

to the understanding of ecology from an integral or transdisciplinary perspective. The

work of each is briefly explored in order to situate this work within a larger theoretical

frame.

Chapter 2 provides a basic introduction to the implications of Thomas Kuhns

history of scientific revolutions (1996). The role of paradigms in relation to worldview is

of specific interest, as this complex relationship sets up the discussion of the historical

background that follows in Chapter 3. An understanding of Kuhns analysis of paradigms

in relation to their subjects of studyas well as the overall gestalt image implied by

specific paradigmatic structuresis considered alongside a philosophical history that

adds support to Kuhns overall assessment of scientific revolutions.

Chapter 3 explores the history of evolution and ecology, drawing out the mutually

implicated character of scientific practice and theory making. Science, from a historical

perspective, is the struggle towards certain kinds of knowledge, articulated within the


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gestalt motifs of a particular paradigmatic frame. The history of science, in the Kuhnian

sense, is equally about paradigmatic revolutions and the infoldment of paradigmatic

values within the political and social imaginaries of the time, as much as it is about the

application of hypotheses, theory testing, and problem solving. This chapter also

introduces several ideas that are relevant to the understanding of current debates in

evolution and ecology, both of which are essential to understanding Chapter 5.

This history also provides a background for current debates in ecological science,

centered on the tension arising from two main schools of thought: evolutionary ecology

and ecosystems ecology. This tension will serve to demonstrate that ecological

communities are multitiered and can be described in numerous ways depending upon the

operative paradigm employed. The aim here is to demonstrate that evolutionary and

ecosystems ecology have recently reached a synthesis that, while not complete, lends

itself to a more thorough description of ecological communities. A transdisciplinary

perspective on ecological sciences further complexifies the need to rethink ecology in

terms of its relation to a matrix of diverse actors. These actors are complexly natural,

cultural, and technological.

Chapter 4 examines different emerging paradigms of scientific research that are in

various ways analogous to the synthesis achieved in ecological thinking. Three paradigms

in particular are examined: dialectical biology, niche construction theory (NCT), and

autopoiesis. The aim here will be to describe the major tenets of each at some length,

differentiate them from other theories of evolution, and to apply them in specific

empirical scenarios. The implications of these paradigms extend beyond simply the

practices of evolutionary sciences, and imply a shift in the demarcation between the


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natural, cultural, and paradigmatic spheres. These shifts have real consequences for the

relationship between evolution and cultural theory.

Niche construction theory is especially highlighted because of the implications of

this paradigm for human cultural theory. Here, the insights of NCT are thought in terms

specific to human communities. NCT encourages a dynamic view of evolution and

ecology that has implications for cultural theory, and the relation between natural

ecologies and human cultural systems. NCT, along with other conceptions of human

ecology, highlight the problems of disciplinary specializations in terms of their adequacy

to studying ecology. This section also marks the transition from the scientifically situated

problems of contemporary evolution and ecology, moving towards the philosophical

considerations that become necessary to explore the relationship between ecology,

culture, and knowledge.

Chapter 5 moves the reader into philosophical discourses that connect the insights

of media ecology, actor-network theory (ANT), and epistemological debates that

highlight the role of conceptual structures in effecting perception in research. It is argued

that these complex systems of discourse form an ecology in their own right, ecologies

that are always coupled to, and recursively transformative of, the systems that they study.

Chapter 6 offers concluding remarks and affirms the original thesis that ecology is

entering a paradigmatic phase of its development which has implications not only for

science, but for politics, cultural theory, and philosophy as well. I discuss the

implications for approaching ecology in a complex and integral way and point to the

future development of integral ecological paradigms.


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CHAPTER 1

TYTHE THREEFOLD STRUCTURESwedish environmental scientist, economic theorist, and anthropologist Alf

Hornborg comments on the threefold distinction between ecology, culture, and

knowledge, arguing that such a three-part formula can be found in a variety of

approaches to environmental history (2001).1

Hornborg writes: The recurrent, triadic

scheme is not arbitrary but reflects the complementarity of perspectives on human-

environment relations deriving, respectively, from the natural sciences, the social

sciences, and the humanities (2001, 192). In Hornborgs work this triad is broken into

environment, society, and person.

For Hornborg, the only entity where consciousness, cognition, and meaning are

united through agency is the person. Even though other categories such as culture,

symbolism, or ideology may precede or transcend an individuals behavior, and in

this way play a role in constituting it, Hornborg argues, it is through concrete persons

that such abstract phenomena intervene in the world (2001, 192). In other words, even

though symbolic systems of exchange and cultural environments have real impacts on the

constitution of the world, it is, for Hornborg, only the person that can engage in practices

of cultural and symbolic production, and that, without the volition of such persons,

symbolic or cultural systems cannot impact the world.

The environment-society-person triad suggested by Hornborg requires a

transdisciplinary methodological approach that unites ecological, sociological, and

1. Hornborg comments that Merchant, McEvoy, and Worster also use a threefold

model of production, ecology, and a third element that varies amongst the three:forms of consciousness (Merchant), cognition (McEvoy), and structures of

meaning (Worster).


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existential phenomena. Because of this, Hornborg draws not only on a broad span of

disciplinary specialties, but also calls into question the line drawn between objective and

subjective phenomena that often separates the sciences and humanities in the academy.

Modern environmental problems Hornborg writes, have a subjective dimension that

has to do with the constitution of the modern person, as well as an objective dimension

that has to do with the organization of the market economy, but the triangle suggests that

these two dimensions are ultimately aspects of a single phenomenon of modernity

(2001, 194).

In arguing for a complex, relational epistemology, Hornborg acknowledges that

human cognition, or knowledge, whatever its form, is always a mutually constellating act

that designates simultaneously the knower, as a subject, and the known, as an object of

knowledge. Emphasizing this relationship, Hornborg explores the recursivity of the

subject-object split and notes that such a relational epistemology is foundational to the

work of biological scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela as well as

anthropologist Gregory Batesons ecology of mind(Hornborg 2001). Hornborgs

relationist epistemology argues that a simplistic, constructivist notion of Nature must

be transcended, just as an essentialist one must be abandoned. By this Hornborg means

that notions of Naturewhen interpreted as culturally constructed projections of a

historically embedded society, though crucial to critical approaches to human-

environment relations, and, while not being ignoredare themselves not sufficient in

understanding contemporary ecological problems, nor are they accurately descriptive of

ontological spaces designated as Nature. Likewise, essentialist views that depict Nature

as existing out there in a pure state separate from human activity, also points to an


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insufficient understanding of ecological processes. If natural landscapes virtually

everywhere carry traces of human activity Hornborg suggests, then the conclusion must

be that nature is imbued with human culture and that language intervenes in ecological

processes (192). Thus, for Hornborg, human linguistic and cultural practices directly

impact the surrounding ecologies within an environmental-social-person world space.

Furthermore It can also be argued, conversely, that ecological relationships have always

been communicative phenomena, and that human symbolism and language are only the

latest additions to the semiotics of ecosystems (192).Hornborgs semiotic approach to

ecology that links the environment-society-person triad into an integrative paradigm is

indicative of a shift in methodological practices towards an integral approach to ecology.2

Leaving Hornborgs approach, the following threefold approaches to ecology

emerge in the thought of French theorists Felix Guattaris three ecologies (2008) and

Edgar Morins paradigm of complexity (2008) based in part on his concept of self-

eco-organization. It is worth noting, as political scientist Kerry Whiteside (2002) has

done, that French approaches to ecological thought tend to differ from their Anglo-

American counterparts. French theorists are apt to emphasize a noncentered approach

to ecology, whereas the Anglo-American traditions prefer a centered paradigm of

ecological research. For the Anglo-Americans, ecological debates (particularly in the area

of environmental ethics) focus on disagreements between anthropocentric or

ecocentric systems of value (Whiteside 2002). Either ecological communities are

essentially valuable because they are useful to humans as a resource, either for aesthetic

or utilitarian reasons (anthropocentric), or ecological communities are seen as inherently

2. For more on semiotic approaches to biology and ecology, see Jesper

Hoffmeyers Signs of Meaning in the Universe (1996).


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valuable (ecocentric). The point is that the locus of value is centeredeither on the side of

human beings, or on the ecological community as a whole.

Conversely, Whiteside (2002) argues, French ecological thinkers do not recognize

a stable boundary between humans and nature. Rather: [French ecologists] maintain

that what nature is shifts in relation to epistemological, social and political-ethical

changes. Noncentered ecologists see nature as multiform and as inextricably

confounded with humanitys projects and self-understandings. They are attentive to how

the very meaning of being human is tied up with our constructions of nature (3).For

French theorists such as Morin (2008) and Guattari (2008), it makes little sense to assume

value between two separate domains (humans or nature) when those separate domains

are, in fact and experience, not separate at all, but are always mutually constellating!

With Whitesides distinctions in mind, I offer brief descriptions to the approaches of both

Morin and Guattari.

Felix Guattari argues that, because of humanitys integration into what he calls

integrated world capitalism (or IWC for short), a global economic system without a

geographic center of power, that, in the words of Guattaris translator a new type of

individual is being shaped and moulded by the unseen pressures of market forces (2008,

4). Guattari suggests that human subjectivity is caught within a mass media environment

that impacts ways of being human and manipulates ones sense of taste, need, and

belonging. In response to this, Guattari suggests three ecologies are necessary: the

environmental, the social, and the mental. Just as the environment requires defense

against the damaging effects of industrialization, so do the social ecology and mental


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ecology require cultivation, defense, and maintenance. In this regard, Guattari, like

Hornborg, is also inspired by Batesons (2000) concept of the ecology of mind.

Natural environments are devastated by industrial exploitation, just as social

relations are disaggregated when international market interests intervene on the stability

of local communities. Likewise the mental ecology calls one to a practice of

subjectivity that affirms Guattaris belief, stated in his own words, that: We must ward

off, by every means possible, the entropic rise of a dominant subjectivity. Rather than

remaining subject, in perpetuity, to the seductive efficiency of economic competition, we

must reappropriate Universes of value so that processes of singularization can rediscover

their consistency (2008, 45). In this way, ecological knowledge and practice, for

Guattari, are simultaneously environmental, social and mental. Affirming Whitesides

noncentered approach to ecology, Guattari argues this tri-ecological vision is

necessary for environmental, social and individual well-being.

Edgar Morin forwards his Paradigm of Complexity as an epistemological and

ethical necessity in the construction of knowledge, which for Morin, is always subject to

error and illusion (2001). Morins translator, and one of his leading interpreters in the

English language, Sean Kelly, writes that Morin sought to articulate a sociology of the

present, that through a fundamental anthropology brought together cultural theory and

life sciences in a new wayA fundamental anthropology, Kelly writes, which

respects the irreducible complexity of the human phenomenon and conceives of human

evolution in terms of a dialectic among such normally exclusive terms as nature and

culture, the individual, the species, and society constitute one single bio-psycho-social-

cultural-system (1999, xv).


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Morin (Morin & Kern 1999) articulates his research through what he calls the

paradigm of complexity, that, as Kelly (1999) explains, is composed of three parts. First,

the paradigm of complexity is dialogical, which is to say that two items of study always

exist in a dynamic tension. Second, this dialogic is also always recursive, pointing to

the fact that dialogical processes are circular, and feed back upon themselves. Third, is

the holographic principle, that, incorporating the principles of the dialogic and

recursivity, maintains that the part/whole distinction, present in every system, is such

that, the part is in the whole, but the whole is, holographically, also in the part (Kelly

1999, xvi). Thus the paradigm of complexity, operating with these three principles,

delineates a new program and relation to knowledge and its construction. Morin writes:

Specialized knowledge is itself a particular form of abstraction. Specialization abs-

tracts, that is, it extracts an object from a given field, rejects the links and

interconnections with its environment, and inserts it in the abstract conceptual zone of the

compartmentalized discipline (Morin & Kern 1999, 123).

Morins (Morin and Kern 1999) meta-paradigmatic approach to knowledge and

specialized scientific research follows from his concept of self-eco-organization, a

threefold approach to the development of any system, be it biological, cultural, or

ideological. Rather than say an organism, for example, is self-organizing, a common

metaphoric description used in popular accounts of biological science, Morin highlights

the role of context, or ecology, in the self-organizing dynamics of any system. Thus an

organism is never merely self-organizing, but rather, builds itself up out of an already

existing environment such that the term self-eco-organization is more appropriate as a

descriptive term. These three elements (self, oikos, and organization), follow


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Morins three principles of the paradigm of complexity such that each is dialogic,

recursive, and holographic. In this way self-eco-organization is recursively related in that

the self-organization of organisms always impacts the environment, whilst that

environment is impacting the unfolding of the organism. This recursivity is dialogic in

nature, implying that the self-eco relationship exists in a dynamic tension, each

component driving the other. Finally, the self-eco-organization is holographic, in that,

already present within the DNA of the organism is a set of adaptive traits that

corresponds to a historically internalized set of environmental factors. The organism is

inside the environment just as the environment is inside the organism.

Alf Hornborg, Felix Guattari, and Edgar Morin all approach the sciences of

ecology from a three-part structure that informs this work. Their work provides a

historical background to the integral approach to ecology emerging in contemporary

scientific practices. Even when not explicitly stated, their work provides a substantial

background to the arguments in this paper.


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CHAPTER 2

THE ECOLOGY OF PARADIGMS

Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary

historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that whenparadigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm,

scientists adopt new instruments and look in new places. Even more important,during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with

familiar instruments in places they have looked before . . . Insofar as their onlyrecourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that

after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world.(Kuhn 1996, 111)

That scientific research takes place within the constraints of paradigms is perhaps

not so surprising. A common set of principles that delineate the structure of objects to be

studied, a universal language with which to describe such objects, and an established

protocol for interpreting the incoming data recorded about those objects seems

rudimentary and uncontroversial. Had historian of science Thomas Kuhn stopped at this

point, his work would have been interesting, but not groundbreaking in the way it has

been. For Kuhn, paradigms, though always connected to specific modes of scientific

practice, are also related to a more general understanding of nature itself. Kuhn writes: I

have so far argued only that paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display

a sense in which they are constitutive of nature as well (1996, 110).What is one to make

of such a statement as this? To explore the relationship between the ecology of nature and

the conceptual ecology of the research worker, it is necessary to treat this question with

detail and care. The following chapter explores this central issue: In what way are

paradigms implicated in scientific research, and how are they connected to the larger

ecology of experience of the research worker? What is the relationship of this ecology of

knowledge to the ecology of nature? I draw here on Kuhns work on paradigms,


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supported by his predecessor Michael Polanyi (2009), and the associated pragmatist

philosophies that lend credibility to the perspectives of both historians of science.

To begin, I quote here at some length various informative passages from Kuhns

work to illustrate the point at hand. Kuhn notes:

Looking at a contour map, the student sees lines on paper, the cartographer apicture of terrain. Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees

confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events.Only after a number of such transformations of vision does the student become an

inhabitant of the scientists world . . . (1996, 111)

How is it that a student must undergo a process of transformation in order to inhabit the

scientists world? Such a statement implies that sciencewhich on the surface seems to

be a tool that the researcher can handle at will, or an object that can be picked up and

applied to some external eventreveals itself rather to be an encompassing space, an

environment which one must acclimate to and inhabit. Rather than the researcher

possessing a tool for use in scientific study, it appears that a paradigm is more like an

environment within which the researcher works. Kuhn continues:

The world that the student then enters is not, however, fixed once and for all bythe nature of the environment, on the one hand, and of science, on the other.

Rather it is determined jointly by the environment and the particular normal-scientific tradition that the student has been trained to pursue. (1996, 111-112)

This point is critical; it demonstrates that, for Kuhn, it is not the case that because

paradigms reorganize ones perception of the natural world that somehow each paradigm

is an equal fit. Researchers are not free to construct any paradigm that suits their

imaginative whims. Rather, the research paradigm andthe environment being studied are

in a tightly coupled relationship. To borrow biologist Francisco Varela and cognitive

scientist Evan Thompsons (2007) terminology, paradigms and their fields of study can


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be described as structurally coupled, two complex ecologies merging to produce the

meaning described by a given scientific paradigm.3

Likewise, Michael Polanyi (2009) suggests a structural kinship between the

subjects and objects of study. Structural kinships are very sensitive to the performance of

perception itself. For Polanyi, subjects and objects are mutually constellating and are

prone to subtle, collective shifts through the act of perception. Through time, structural

kinships constellate in different ways such that This capacity of a thing to reveal itself in

unexpected ways in the future I [Michael Polanyi] attribute to the fact that the thing

observed is an aspect of reality possessing a significance that is not exhausted by our

conception of any single aspect of it (32). In the effort to produce an intelligent,

adequate description of the perceptual process of interpretation, Polanyi, like Kuhn,

understands the subtle shaping of experience that accompanies any pursuit of knowledge.

In shaping experience through knowledge, a variety of integrative modes are

possible, each one corresponding to a variety of worldviews (e.g., the world is best

described asx and results primarily from the interactions ofy) or disciplinary

specializations (as in physics, chemistry, biology, or anthropology). I suggest that the

relationships of these multiple modes, both to one another, and to the worlds they study,

are best described by the term ecology of knowledge.

For Polanyi, the structure of perception throws light on the entire cosmology for

which that mode of perception is possible: Thus do we form, intellectually and

practically, an interpreted universe populated by entities, the particulars of which we have

interiorized for the sake of comprehending their meaning in the shape of coherent

3. Varela and Thompsons theory of enactivism is described in detail in Chapter

3.


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entities (2009, 29). In this way, articles of knowledge are not merely descriptions of

objects that we can claim to understand as fixed totalities with definite characteristics, but

rather it is, to use Polyanis language, by a process of indwelling that we, the observers

of phenomena, can interiorize and co-create, and in this way, relate to the multitudinous

flux of perceptual phenomena to which we have access. This process of indwelling is the

manner in which the subjects awareness of particulars is jointly constituted into a variety

of cohesive entities that can be studied or understood. For Kuhn, these jointly

constituted particulars, as described by Polanyi, may be thought as the shifting elements

that are brought together within newly emerging paradigms. Each new paradigm

incorporates elements from its historical antecedents, but also draws forth from reality

unique forms of organization that structure scientific research for the subsequent

generation of scientists.

In the context of ecological science, then, it is not the case that a fixed

environment exists waiting to be studied, nor that there exists a simple discriminating

principle that delineates one program of research as more accurate than another. Rather,

as one can see in both the history of biology and in the current debates circulating

amongst ecologists (outlined in Chapter 3), there are multiple paradigmatic constructions

possible within the context of an ecosystem that is itself multiple and complex.

That paradigms are a form of structural kinship between environments and

scientists needs further justification. Kuhn, drawing on psychological research on the

effect of context and suggestion on perception offers:

Surveying the rich experimental literature from which these examples are drawnmakes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception

itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon whathis previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of


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such training there can only be, in William James phrase, a bloomin buzzinconfusion. (1996, 113)

At this point, Kuhn has broken beyond the tight definition of a paradigm as a protocol for

conducting normal scientific research and has entered into larger epistemological arenas

concerning the relationship between paradigms, perception, and the organization of

experience itself.

The link here between perception and experience troubles the scientist who

wishes to rest science upon the solid bedrock of objective fact. Kuhn will give no such

reprieve, but acknowledges the difficulty his intuition inspires: Many readers will surely

want to say that what changes with a paradigm is only the scientists interpretation of

observations that themselves are fixed once and for all by the nature of the environment

and of the perceptual apparatus (1996, 120).This statement indicates a bias in the

scientific mode of thought, which posits that a fixed environment exists out there and is

accessible to the scientist, provided that the scientist is well prepared in the scientific

tradition of the moment. Kuhns invocation of William James in the above quotation is

telling. The epistemological shift Kuhn implied by the lack of fixity in the environment

has a long history in the Jamesian tradition of pragmatism. This point is worth dwelling

on for a moment, as it adds a substantial philosophical validation of Kuhns ideas in this

area.

One can draw here on others in the pragmatist tradition such as Charles Sanders

Pierce and John Dewey. Their contributions to philosophy are not tangential to Kuhns

arguments on the relationship between paradigms and the environment of study. Pierce

James, and Dewey all argue for continuity in evolutionary processes so that no clear split


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between language and reality, or paradigm and environment can be made (Henning

2005).

Brian Henning argues that Pierce, James and Dewey set out to create a new

system of metaphysics that, rather than promoting a bifurcation of reality as an

ontological starting point, sought to create a cosmological scheme of relationships

between disparate domains (2005). Pierce, for example began with the presupposition

that reality is fundamentally continuous, referring to his theory assynechism. In contrast

to prevailing metaphysics, which either reduced realitythat is, materialism and

idealism- or bifurcated reality into mutually exclusive parts- that is, dualism- Pierces

synechism points towards an evolutionary cosmology(quoted in Pierce 2005, 22).

William James, Henning argues, likewise resists the bifurcating tendency available to

philosophy: According to James, most philosophers conceive of entities as self-

enclosed, wholly complete by themselves . . . James believes that this view of reality is

misguided because it takes our linguistic constructions as designating ontological

relations . . . He continues: Existence for James cannot be compartmentalized into

conceptual blocks, each of which excludes every other (2005, 23).

Finally, Henning adds Deweys conception of time to the discussion when he

writes: Thus, just as modern and classical notions of absolute time led to an absolute

dualism between humans and nature, the notion of time as existence implies a conception

of reality that calls into question the view of reality as bifurcated (2005, 25). The

perspectives of Pierce, James, and Dewey closely echo ontologically what Polanyi and

Kuhn suggest epistemologically. That is to say that our knowledge of the world, as it

changes our perceptual capacities for experience, travels and evolves alongside the world


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it studies. No clear delineation between the world and our knowledge or experience of it

is possible; rather, the two form a complex interdependent system. This interdependence,

I believe, is ecological in nature. Henning, writing on Dewey, goes on to say: Such a

view affects a fundamental shift in our conception of humanitys place in the universe.

According to such a view, humanity is different in degree, rather than in kind, from

nature (2005, 25).

The work of Pierce, James, and Dewey represents criticisms of three fundamental

positions common in Western philosophy: idealismwhere ideas are primary and, matter

is epiphenomenal; materialismwhere matter is primary and, ideas are epiphenomenal;

and dualismwhere matter and ideas are both active, but are essentially separate and

distinct substances. Kuhns commentary on the relationship between paradigm and

environment are difficult and troublesome not so much because of any cognitive

challenge in apprehending his point, but rather, one could argue, because his argument

fails to fit into traditional philosophical categories. As opposed to compartmentalizing

these aspects, Kuhns linking of paradigms to their system of study suggests a complex

coupling of perception, experience, and reality, each participating in an ecological matrix

of embedded experience. Uniting the paradigm and environment within a philosophical

context such as pragmatism allows for a strong conceptual base. Biological science

absent of such philosophical experimentation may continue to struggle with these issues.

When critiquing the adaptationist paradigm for example, geneticist Richard

Lewontin points to the role organisms play in constructing or transforming their

environments (1991). The environment, in Lewontins sense, is not a fixed object to be


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adapted to.4

The environment, for Lewontin, is an artifact in part produced by the

activities of organisms, where the organism is also in part an artifact of that environment.

In what sense then is this adaptationist framework repeated in an epistemological arena?

As with organisms adapting to fixed environments, one is faced withparadigms adapting

to fixed environments. There is a tendency to think of the environment as being fixed in a

permanent way. That paradigms change based on the demands of new research is again

not surprising. However, what Kuhn is suggesting is more nuanced and critical.

Kuhn writes: What occurs during a scientific revolution is not fully reducible to

reinterpretation of individual and stable data. In the first place, the data are not

unequivocally stable . . . Rather than being an interpreter, the scientist who embraces a

new paradigm is like the man wearing inverting lenses. Confronting the same

constellation of objects as before and knowing that he does so, he nevertheless finds them

transformed through and through in many of their details (1996, 122). In one of his

many examples, Kuhn cites the Copernican revolution as an instance of scientists looking

at the same objects (the stars in the night sky) using the same instruments, and then began

recording innumerable new celestial events as a result of a paradigm shift to the

Copernican cosmological worldview.

Kuhn argues that the previous classical and medieval paradigms interpreted the

night sky as an immutable heavena changeless realm distinct in nature from that of the

earth, such that once this interpretation had been overcome: The very ease and rapidity

with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments

may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world. In

4. The details of Lewontins argument are explored in Chapter 3.


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any case, their research responded as though that were the case (1996, 117). In moments

such as this, the gestalt shift of a paradigm necessarily reorients the researcher to redefine

some crucial aspects of the cosmos in which they work. In other words, the facts of any

scientific discipline, though real from a certain perspective, are always at risk of being

reorganized into the sweep of an alternative conceptual ecology more adequate to the

nature of what is being studied. This awareness is of particular relevance to ecological

communities, where the associated paradigms of study organize not only inanimate

objects like particles and atoms, but also are involved in the reorganization of complex

systems composed of living beings.

Acknowledging the influence of paradigms opens several epistemological issues

that call into question labels such as raw data and immediate experience. Delving

into these problems, Kuhn writes:

It is, of course, by no means clear that we need be so concerned with immediateexperiencethat is, with the perceptual features that a paradigm so highlights

that they surrender their regularities almost upon inspection. Those features mustobviously change with the scientists commitments to paradigms, but they are far

from what we ordinarily have in mind when we speak of raw data or the bruteexperience from which scientific research is reputed to proceed. (1996, 125)

This problem is not new to philosophy. Descartes formulated the initial setup to this

problem by arguing for two substances: res cogitas and res extensa. That the mental

substance was split from the material substance allowed the stage to be set for three

centuries of epistemological debate that ran from Berkeley to Hume and reached a peak

with Immanual Kant. Again, what Kuhn is suggesting does not follow this frame. The

problem of representing the direct experience of a concrete environment in neutral

language is itself the setup of a particularly sedimented practice of epistemology.


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The idea of descriptive symbols falling along one side of a wall permeated only

by inadequate representation, with concrete phenomena arrayed on the other, is a

historical artifact. Kuhn (1996) and the pragmatists suggest otherwise, first critiquing the

value of a neutrally descriptive language, and second by critiquing the stability of a given

world that is present to description. Because the only worlds possible to describe are

those that are already prepared for description by specific paradigmatic values, a

descriptive language can be said to be continuous with, but never fully adequate to, the

phenomena in question: No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in

advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on the given. Philosophical

investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be

like (1996, 127).

Framing scientific practice in this way is not cause for a despairing solipsism that

contradicts the objective nature of science; the failure of representation does not imply

the loss of concrete worlds either in knowledge or in experience. It merely reinscribes the

notion that the philosophical projects of materialism, idealism, and dualism are

themselves paradigms that can no longer confront in an adequate way the knowledge

provided by a historical account of scientific revolutions. However, we must push past

even this sophisticated postmodern insight and insist on the relation of paradigms to each

other, and to the worlds they enact.

The ecology of the natural world is complex because the nature of paradigms is

such that they must emphasize certain phenomena and not others (Kuhn 1996).

Nevertheless, the term thermodynamics refers to the concrete world of ecosystems

ecology, and evolutionary theory accounts for the real events of organic life forms in


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their ongoing transformation and evolution. But, as is shown in Chapters 3 and 4, the

ecosystem is an ecology that can be understood in multiple ways, using different

descriptive languages that are active in the bringing forth of specific aspects of an

ecosystem. Our original point is in this way affirmed: natural ecologies are linked to

conceptual ecologies. Paradigms, and the history of scientific revolutions, represent an

avenue into studying the relationship between such ecologies; both of which are

complexly material (the lived experience of organic bodies) and ideological (the

universal mathematical laws which govern all energy flow in an ecosystem).

As is expressed by NCT, dialectical biology, and enactivism, organisms are

actively engaged in the transformation of their environment, as those environments then

feed back to and transform the organism. This biological interpretation of evolution

which offers the continuity between disparate aspects of a system but maintains the

integrity of individuals (their structurally determined autopoietic nature)offers a model

by which one can understand the relationship between paradigms and the environments

that they study. Again, the notion of coimplicative or mutually enfolded agencies

becomes critical; the idea is inside the event as the event is inside the idea. It is in this

way that one can describe an ecology of paradigms. The ecological turn suggests that

paradigms are not representational structures of fixed environments that suffer or succeed

in greater levels of adaptive fit. Rather, through ecologizing the paradigmatic structure it

becomes possible to understand paradigms as creative and productive of new worlds of

understanding. The creative potential of the paradigm thus has a concrete impact on how

living systems are organized and in what manner humans relate to them.


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CHAPTER 3

POLITICS AND PARADIGMS IN THE HISTORY OF ECOLOGY

The history of ecology, because it is so heavily influenced by evolutionary theory

and other branches of science, cannot be thought of as an isolated school of thought.

Rather, the history of ecology can be viewed as the concrescence of several disciplines

that range variously from physics, chemistry, biology, geography, anthropology, and

theology. As such, the history accounted for here draws diversely from these branches

and attempts to give a background for present day debates in ecological theory. This

chronology builds a context with which the reader can think and understand ecology. For

a full account of the history of evolution the reader is referred to Bowler (2009) and for

the history of ecology to Worster (1994).

The question of beginnings co-arises with any attempt to write history, and one is

forced to ask: Where does the history of ecology start? Again, one can in various ways

argue this point indefinitely, especially if ideological precursors are taken into account.

The following list begins in the eighteenth century, but this should in no way imply to the

reader that older historical currents are not present in the ideas described below.

History of Evolution

Carl Linnaeus (17071778) founded the basis for modern biological classification

in the mid-eighteenth century, a system of identification that would later allow the

cataloguing of the individuals and populations within an ecological system. Though

Linnaeus work was helpful in producing taxonomies of the natural world, his conception

of the universe as a divinely ordered chain of being was decidedly different from the one


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modern science describes. For Linnaeus the universe was ordered and created by God,

and did not originally support the idea that new species emerged (though he did

eventually change his position). For most of his life, Linnaeus saw a process of

hybridization and recombination among already divinely created species, and never the

emergence of new ones (Bowler 2009, 50-51).

Linnaeus was a vitalist who envisioned a world of stable, circular flow. Though

balanced and benevolent, Nature, for Linnaeus, was a fixed hierarchy, unchanging over

time, that expressed itself through man in a natural theology (Bramwell 1989, 46). With

an eye for biology still under the control of classical theological thinking, Linnaeus

certainly contributed to biology, but his ideas could still not yet be considered as

evolutionary or ecologicalin the contemporary sense.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (17441829) marks the first place in history where a true

sense of evolution is described, though whether or not his version of evolution can be

said to be a viable precursor to modern accounts of evolutionary theory is contested. It is

not debated that Lamarcks theory of acquired characteristics was the first major and

comprehensive attempt to construct a theory that supported the view that all living forms

emerged from primitive ancestors. However, where nineteenth century neo-Lamarckians

assumed Lamarck to have been the first to propose a modern theory of evolution based

on the idea of descent from a single ancestor, subsequent historians of science now argue

that Lamarcks vision was based on a very different set of principles from those that now

furnish the underpinnings of modern scientific ideas about evolution (Bowler 2009, 86-

87).


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Lamarck occupies a place in the history of evolution that stands between the

ideals of the Romantic worldview that emphasized an organismic, interdependent holism,

but also drew heavily from the insights of Enlightenment materialism, which favored a

universal, mechanistic interpretation of the universe (Bowler 2009, 87).In Lamarcks

understanding, the mechanism of evolution was twofold.

First, an organism develops capacities throughout its lifetime based on the

frequent and continuous usage of specific aspects of its morphology. Thus, what is used

more often is strengthened and improved; that which is not used deteriorates. The

strengths of an organism depend then upon the way that organism behaves through time.

These traits, accumulated over a single life span, would then be passed on to the next

generation through heredity.

Secondly, the environment largely determines the use of certain traits over others;

those aspects or traits an organism modifies through use are selected by the demands of

external conditions (Bowler 2009, 92). The latter of Lamarcks two postulates, the

environmental selection of acquired characteristics within a species, would remain

scientifically viable up through the Darwinian revolution. However, Lamarck was said to

have placed greater emphasis on the initial behavioral modification than on the effects of

the environment (Bowler 2009, 93).

For some, modern genetic research seems to have invalidated Lamarcks claims

of acquired characteristics (Bowler 2009). Others, such as Margulis (1998) and Margulis

and Sagan (1997) have argued that variants of Lamarcks theory of adaptation by

acquired characteristics are features of symbiogenesis, defined as evolutionary change

by the inheritance of acquired gene sets (Margulis 1998, 9).Gunter (2008) argues that


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Lamarckianism is again being seen as a viable evolutionary mechanism, arguing for two

kinds of acquired characteristics: temporary and permanent. Citing multiple studies on

emus, water fleas, and radishes, Gunter finds evidence for Lamarckian inheritance. In

these cases, the question is not if, but how, this process of acquired inheritance functions.

Gunter also recognizes the insights of Margulis symbiogenesis theory, but differentiates

this form of inheritance from his own arguments on neo-Lamarckianism.5

Lamarcks

contributions to evolutionary thinking for these reasons, remain controversial.

From a different perspective, Gould (1981) argues that though biological

evolution does not appear to operate via Lamarckian mechanisms, cultural evolution, in

fact, does. Cultural evolution, as opposed to biological evolution, can operate in a

Lamarckian mode because, whatever one individual or generation learns in its lifetime,

can be passed to the next by writing, instruction, inculcation, ritual, tradition, and a host

of methods that humans have developed to assure continuity in culture (Gould 1981,

325).

Taking these multiple perspectives on the legacy of Lamarck prohibits one from

adamantly proposing that Lamarckianism has been left to history. Though his legacy is

unclear, and his proposed mechanisms of evolution are still contested and argued over,

Lamarck remains a pivotal, though controversial figure, in the history of evolutionary

thought.

5. Margulis: Symbiosis is a kind, but not the notorious kind, of Lamarckianism.

Lamarckianism, named for Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who the French claim was the firstevolutionist, is often dismissed as inheritance of acquired characteristics. In simple

Lamarckianism, organisms inherit traits induced in their parents environmentalconditions, whereas through symbiogenesis, organisms acquire not traits but entire other

organisms, and of course, their entire sets of genes! (1998, 8).


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Lamarck was followed by Georges Cuvier (17691832), a biologist who strongly

opposed Lamarcks theories and developed new techniques in comparative taxonomy

such that For Cuvier, the relationships between species were based on similarities in

their internal structure, not on an ordered ranking of their external characters (Bowler

2009, 94).Cuviers comparative anatomy, juxtaposed to the Linnaean divinely ordered

taxonomy (which rested on the idea of a great chain of being spanning from the simplest

life on earth, peaking with man and driving straight towards God), marks another

paradigm shift in thought that indicates a broader turn away from divinely ordered

explanatory principles, even if Cuvier and the French scientific community he was well

regarded within (itself a part of a conservative aristocracy), remained for the most part

theistic (Bowler 2009).

Charles Lyell (17971875) has been described as the founder of modern geology

(Bowler 2009).His workPrinciples of Geology proposed the method of

uniformitarianism: the rate of all changes is presumed to be absolutely uniform through

time. Only observable causes acting at observable intensities can be used to explain past

events (130-131).Lyell believed, according to Bowler, that: The chief obstacle to

scientific progress have been the willingness to speculate about unknown causes in the

past, and the refusal to contemplate a massive extension of the history of the earth

(Bowler 2009, 131).Lyells view of the earth was tied deeply to science, but also to

prevailing intuitions concerning Gods nature. For Lyell, evidence of Gods participation

in the structure and order of the world could be directly evidenced by the observable fact

that the earth had apparently maintained a perfect and self-regulatory system for the


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entire period to which human inquiry had access. God then, was a perfect workman,

with creation held in an eternal balance (Bowler 2009, 132).

Lyells commitments to both a classical theism and scientific advances through

the study of geology had mixed effects. On the one hand, he argued for an extension of

geological timelines in an age when the clergy still tried to maintain a literal

interpretation of the Genesis story. On the other hand, because he was still committed to a

classical theology, his expansion of earths timeline also coevolved with a sense that the

earth had changed little since its creation, that animals did not, on the whole, go extinct,

and furthermore, that the appearance of human beings in the midst of other life forms on

earth was a special case of divine intervention.6

Morality, intelligence, and spirituality,

for Lyell, were not the product of a gradual evolution of an earth that primarily existed in

a steady state, but were rather imported by God into creation (Bowler 2009).

Though Lamarcks theories are credited as being the first truly evolutionary

paradigm, it is Charles Darwins 1859 publication of his On the Origin of Species that

systematically lays out the principle mechanism of evolution that history has carried forth

to the present day: evolution by natural selection. Applying Lyells extended timeline and

gradualist perspective of geological change to the natural world, Darwin (18091882)

interpreted evolution as the adaptation of organisms to their surrounding environments

over long time scales. Any theory or doctrine, be it scientific, religious, or political, that

has had as much cultural impact as Darwins theory of evolution is necessarily complex

and contestable from a variety of directions.

6. Larson affirms this point: Lyells uniformitarianism . . . did not challenge thedoctrine of special creation in biology, however. If anything it expanded the Creators

role by requiring ongoing or recurrent creation events (2006, 90).


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Bowler (2009) suggests that there are two main approaches to Darwins theory: an

internalapproach that sees Darwin as a scientist working in his field trying to solve the

specific scientific problems of his day, and an externalapproach which suggests that

Darwins emphasis on competition and struggle were projections of his embeddedness in

nineteenth century economic and political ideologies. The externalist enthralls in the

study of science in terms of its cultural impact and embeddedness. Focusing on the

historicity of the scientific endeavor, the externalist sidelines important scientific issues.

The internalist, on the other hand, proceeds via an ahistorical understanding of scientific

practice, centralizing only the relevant scientific problems at the expense of socio-

historical issues.

Thus, The one reduces Darwin to a puppet controlled by ideological forces,

mechanically translating his social prejudices into an equivalent view of nature. The other

views him as the discoverer of a self-evident model of nature who merely saw what was

there (Bowler 2009, 143-144). For the externalist, Darwins theory is viewed with

skepticism because of the way natural selection lined up with the political ideologies of

the time. For Darwin, natural selection was the struggle for survival in the context of a

finite environment composed of resources that must be competitively obtained; what was

success for one was a loss for the other.

Darwins thinking in this area was heavily inspired by Thomas Malthus 1798

workEssay on the Principle of Population (1983). The Malthusian struggle for

existence was based on the observation that population grows geometrically, whilst the

ability to increase food supplies grew only arithmetically. Bowler describes Malthus as a

clergyman who believed God had created such an apparently harsh situation for


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humankind for a moral purpose (Bowler 2009 104). The fact that Malthus was also a

supporter of the prevailing economic regimes, also added support to the externalist

position that Darwin was simply reading into nature the political views of his time:

Malthus was certainly an exponent of laissez-faire: he believed that state relief for the

poor merely encouraged them to breed more rapidly. There is no doubt that the principles

of utilitarianism and individualism form the common context within which both social

and biological theories were debated (Bowler 2009, 105).

The work of Thomas Malthus and others such as Adam Smiths The Wealth of

Nations (published in 1776), had already created an environment that envisioned the

competitive individual, acting in a free market, as the primary (and healthiest) motive

force in society. That Darwin would similarly argue for the role of competition seemed to

naturalize the political thinking of the time, in ways that would anticipate but not fully

articulate, the social Darwinian paradigms that would emerge in the twentieth century.

Though Darwins natural selection was An ecology based on struggle (Bowler

2009, 152) that fit in with the dominant political and economic regimes of the late

nineteenth century, it did finally appear that a mechanism adequate to explaining

evolution had been found, at least within the scientific understanding of the time.8

8. In contemporary evolutionary thought, though smaller in number, several

scientists, many cited in this work, maintain that natural selection via adaptation is still aninadequate mechanism to explain the complexity and diversity of evolution. Gunter

(2008), Lewontin (1991), Levins and Lewontin (1985), Lewontin and Levins (2007),Margulis (1998), Margulis and Sagan (1997), Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1983),

Thompson (2007), Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman (2003), Maturana and Varela(1998), and Ayala (2008) do not deny the role of natural selection but maintain, in

various ways, that this account of evolution remains incomplete.


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In Darwins understanding, evolution by natural selection meant that organisms

with certain traits adapted more or less successfully to fixed environments. The

organisms better suited to the environment would have a reproductive advantage and so

would leave more offspring, offspring which through processes of heredity would possess

similar traits as their parents. In this way, the environment, without predetermination,

selects amongst the traits in a population; this is the long sought after mechanism by

which species transform over time. Darwin remains the central figure in historical texts,

scientific thinking and in social imaginaries when it comes to the topic of evolution.

Gregor Mendel (18221884) founded the basis for modern genetics in the 1850s

and 1860s. Mendels work along with Darwins theory of natural selection became

known in the 20th

century as the modern synthesis, which combined the insights of both

theories to articulate the currently dominate mode of understanding in both ecology and

evolution. Gregor Mendel, a monk from Brno, Czechoslovakia, was able to show with

certainty that specific heritable traits, without exhibiting any change, could be transmitted

between parents and offspring. The changes in populations as a result of natural selection,

which Darwinian evolution emphasized, showed that changes in inherited characteristics

effected the differential survival and reproduction of organisms (Margulis & Sagan 1997,

270).

Ayala (2008) notes that the interest in genetics emerged following Theodosius

Dobzhanskys 1937 paper Genetics and the Origin of Species. Ayala also comments

that the use of the terms neo-Darwinism and the modern synthesis are most

commonly used in historical or philosophical contexts, suggesting that biologists refer to


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their theories more straightforwardly as just evolution, indicating the extent to which

the modern synthesis has been accepted by the scientific community (Alaya 2008).

In 1975 E. O. Wilson published his highly controversial bookSociobiology: The

New Synthesis, defining sociobiology as the systemic study of the biological basis of all

social behavior (2000, 4). From Wilsons perspective, the neo-Darwinian impact on

evolutionary theory (expressed in the modern synthesis) has reshaped every mode of

human inquiry with implications even for social sciences and the humanities (including

philosophy, poetry, and the fine arts). For Wilson, each discipline now awaits integration

as the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the modern synthesis (4).

Sociobiologys purpose is to enact this transition of the social sciences and humanities

into alignment with a neo-Darwinian paradigm that explains all human endeavors in

terms of their adaptive significance within the context of population genetics(4).

In this manner, Wilsons sociobiological paradigm ventured, as the name implies,

to account for elements of human cultural and sociological behavior in ways that could be

explained by Darwins mechanism of natural selection, combined with twentieth century

insights into genetics. Wilsons aim was to produce a science of measured predictability

that could demonstrate that cultural behaviors could be explained as accurately as the

phenomena studied in other sciences such as physics and chemistry.

This approach has been criticized numerous times since Wilson first suggested it

in the nineteen seventies (see below), and as such has reformulated itself in response to

these criticisms, renaming itself generally as the field now known as evolutionary

psychology. Nevertheless, as recently as 1998, Wilson has continued with his program to


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explain and reformulate the social sciences and the humanities in terms of biophysical

principles in his bookConsilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

Following the trend of genetic reductionism, Richard Dawkins published The

Selfish Gene in 1976, arguing that humans are merely sophisticated machines used by

genes for their own survival and reproduction.9The Selfish Gene was both widely read

and highly controversial, with much of the debate surrounding Dawkins definition of

genes, and the role of human beings in their reproduction. Dawkins writes:

Now they [the genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering

robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by torturous

indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; theycreated us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for ourexistence. They have come along way, those replicators. Now they go by the

name of genes, and we are their survival machines. (1976, 19-20)

For Dawkins, the gene is the central unit of natural selection. Gene reproduction is the

sole basis of life, and all varieties of species from bacteria to complex vertebrates with

nervous systems are simply means by which genes replicate; individuals are

epiphenomenal in this sense. Genes and their reproduction are what counts.

The emphasis on the selfish nature of genetic reproduction has caused some to

criticize Dawkins of pursuing an immoral line of inquiry. In his defense, Dawkins states

in the introduction to The Selfish Gene: This brings me to the first point I want to make

about what this book is not. I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am

saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to

behave (1976, 2-3). Similarly, in the endnotes to his text, Dawkins notes the tenacious

9. Dawkins himself admits that the title of his bookThe Selfish Gene could have

just as accurately been titled The Co-operative Gene, citing that selfishness and

cooperation are equally valid methods of promoting gene reproduction, though the lattercan only be thought of as a strategy from promoting the genes own selfish welfare

(2004, 187).


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links between his views on evolution and those of contemporary political ideologies:

Now that Britain has a government of the new right, which has elevated meanness and

selfishness to the status of ideology, my words seem to have acquired a kind of nastiness

by association, which I regret (1976, 268).

Dawkins and Wilson are both noteworthy in that they also evidence a break from

the previous entanglement of theism with biological and evolutionary thought. Contra

Linnaeus, Lyell, and even Darwin, Dawkins (2008) and Wilson (2006) are both firm

atheists; the natural theology previously wed to biological science did not influence the

work of either men, except as a source of criticism.

According to Larson (2006), Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin criticized

the approach forwarded by Wilson and Dawkins, not for religious reasons, but by arguing

that the exclusive emphasis on the natural selection of genes was insufficient in

accounting for the adaptation of organisms. Gould, arguing against variants of biological

determinism such as sociobiology, writes: The classical arguments of biological

determinism fail because the features they invoke to make distinctions among groups are

usually the products of cultural evolution (1981, 325). And that We now believe that

different attitudes and styles of thought among human groups are usually the nongenetic

products of cultural evolution. In short the biologicalbasis of human uniqueness leads us

to reject biological determinism (325). Gould, for biological reasons based on the

nongenetic basis of cultural evolution and change, suggests that the case for biological

determinism is lacking.

Gould specifically attacks sociobiology by arguing that the field employs the

modern interpretation of natural selection (differential reproductive success of


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individuals) in its theory of culture. Gould held that sociobiologists utilize the

Darwinian paradigm to organize individuals around the idea that individuals themselves

are only gene carriers that attempt to maximize the distribution of their genes to

subsequent generations. Sociobiology is thus a projection of the Darwinian paradigm of

natural selection that overlay biological change onto cultural behaviors. For Gould,

sociobiology presents an unwarranted description of culture based on an already present

narrative of natural selection that offers

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