Abstract
In this speculative talk, I'm going to "think" adjacently with Stuart Kauffman's recent work on what he calls "the adjacent possible" in biological systems (Kauffman 2019). My aim is to articulate a way of thinking about the role of "environments" and behavior as the leading edge of evolutionary transitions (here: transitions in both individuality and inheritance, in a particular sense). Kauffman articulates an interesting thesis on what makes a living system: that it must be self-reproducing (in a particular sense) and carry out at least one "work cycle" (again in a particular sense). Kauffman muses that we lack mathematical theories to articulate what he considers the heart of the "problem" with the evolution of such systems -- because their operation changes their own configuration spaces, in a sense there can be no mathematical theory in the conventional sense of dynamical systems theory (which presupposes a fixed configuration space to get the math off the ground). I agree, this is a hard problem for a science of organized, living agents. I think there may be an adjacent "less hard" problem. Kauffman observes that for the kind of living organization he discusses "it takes work to make constraints and it takes constraints to make work." I speculate that the less hard problem can be formulated by considering the production of constraints through processes of ecological scaffolding. The problem is quite as open as Kauffman’s general problem of open “niches,” but it is less hard in the sense that there may be systematic ecological patterns of developmental scaffolding that allows us to study some highly limited problems of evolution into the adjacent eco-developmental possible. I speculate that these scaffolding interactions can lead to the development of configuration spaces, hence eco-developmental scaffolding introduces novelty into development from an environmental source. The talk will link this idea to what I have called “developmental reaction norms” in contrast to standard “ecological reaction norms” (Griesemer 2014). Differently put, step-wise nearby (adjacent) changes in configuration space can be studied by looking for systematic patterns of scaffolding constraints for these local phenomena of constraint production via scaffolding work, rather than by taking on Kauffman's completely general mathematical problem and challenge. I have no illusions that this will solve Kaufmann's hard problem, but there might be some clues to the kinds of mathematics we could be looking for and the kinds of phenomena that might present less-steep empirical challenges than developing a completely new mathematics for such completely general, open empirical problems as the origins of life or the evolution of the biosphere.
