Dawkins and the extended phenotype

[Darwins_Finch]

@runcible spoon

Basically, I think you can consider fast-food wrappers and whatnot part of our extended phenotypes, without holding them up as important parts. But if we’re going to have a rigorous definition of extended phenotype (and I’ll acknowledge that that may not even be necessary, since it’s not really a big scientific issue) then we should call even insignificant changes to the environment part of it.

I disagree. Fast food wrappers are not the product of our genes. This, they are not part of our phenotype, extended or otherwise.

[Darwins_Finch]

@ultrafilter

How does the lake differ from old age diseases with a genetic component? There’s no feedback mechanism there either.

And, as is often pointed out, such diseases have no significant effect on the evolution of the affected species… If neither affects reproduction, then neither are relevant.

[twickster]

@runcible_spoon

I don’t know that there’s one standard for usefulness. For instance, if you’re trying to figure out why a hairless monkey with no muscle tone and shitty survival skills can walk around bits of Alaska without getting et, well, yeah, you’d better be looking at all that environment. Basically, I think you can consider fast-food wrappers and whatnot part of our extended phenotypes, without holding them up as important parts. But if we’re going to have a rigorous definition of extended phenotype (and I’ll acknowledge that that may not even be necessary, since it’s not really a big scientific issue) then we should call even insignificant changes to the environment part of it.

But wouldn’t we need to distinguish between artifacts that are associated with reproductive fitness and those that aren’t?

[Darwins_Finch]

An addendum to my previous comments:

I was doing some reading on this topic, and found a paper by Dawkins titled “Extended Phenotype - But Not Too Extended. A Reply to Laland, Turner and Jablonka” (Biology and Philosophy 19: 377-396, 2004).

In it, he states

@Richard Dawkins

To take a more extreme example than these commentators consider, when I am asked by lay people (as I frequently am) whether buildings count as extended phenotypes, I answer no, on the grounds that the success or failure of buildings does not affect the frequency of the architects’ genes in the gene pool. Extended phenotypes are worthy of the name only if they are candidate adaptations for the benefit of alleles responsible for variations in them.

To put this in context of the original question, that the lake exists might be considered part of the extended phenotype of the beaver (to the extent that, as I mentioned earlier, “deep water” = “good” as far as the beaver is concerned, and that the deep water is a consequence of the beaver’s instinctual behavior); the form of the lake would not necessarily be.

Similarly, appeals, as made above, that (e.g.) fast food wrappers and other “incidental” effects are examples of an extended phenotype are actually over-extending Dawkins’ concept. Dawkins acknowledges niche-changing effects, of course, but does not consider them examples of extended phenotypes (another example he lists in this category is the creation of our oxygen atmosphere by plants; it was not adaptive to the plants at all, but pretty much all terrestrial species since have had to adapt to it. Oxygen is therefore certainly niche-changing, but not an extended phenotype of the plants which emitted it).

[twickster]

Thanks, DF, that’s very helpful.