Preface

This book is about scaffolding, a concept that is becoming widespread in use across disciplines. Its contexts and referents vary, as is likely to happen with metaphors, but we saw common threads in these diverse applications. For us, the coeditors of this volume, “scaffolding” seemed to be what we were doing for each others’ theoretical perspectives on reproduction, development, sociality, and evolution. We shared an early, and formative, experience in Science and Technology Studies, which in its early days brought together philosophers (including agents provocateur Werner Callebaut and psychologist Donald T. Campbell [1916–1996]), natural and social scientists, historians, and others of similar ilk. The shared link was not so much in our disciplines but in the reflexive way of looking at them. Those efforts continued in meetings of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Biology and a shared discussion over the years that eventually led to this volume.

With the generous support of Gerd Müller and Werner Callebaut of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI), Altenberg, we brought together perhaps the broadest range of scholars ever hosted by the KLI. Their interests ranged from the tissues at the boundaries of nonlife and life to the history of synthetic dyes in nineteenth-century Europe coupled with the rise of German research universities to life-span development of the brain to a view of cognition leaving traces in the virtual world of the Internet. We sought phenomena and perspectives that integrate evolution, cognition, culture, and technology across generations, ontogenies, intellectual histories, and wherever else scaffolding is essential to the production of structures and processes, many of which themselves serve also to scaffold. We were interested in juxtapositions, in granularity of phenomena, and resonances that spoke to the foundational concepts of reproduction, repeated assemblies, core groupings, and generative entrenchment. In other words, what emergent understandings might lie latent in the collective enterprise?

A central goal for this edited book is to make our own process of discovery and analysis as visible as possible for readers so that they are able to understand and undertake similar analyses in their own work that can extend or challenge ours. Additionally, we wanted to introduce scaffolding as a complementary alternative to traditional neo-Darwinism, which offers few theoretical tools for culture and cognition. We have hoped thereby to extend the range of and enrich a broadly Darwinian perspective on humankind and our products. Because development, broadly conceived, appeared as a central concept among our contributors, and because our emphasis is on developing new ideas about scaffolding that are still very much a work in progress, the title we adopted for the MIT Press volume is Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition. Thus, this volume is no ordinary compilation of workshop papers. It is the framing, collection of data, analysis, and report of our research project laid bare.

Our efforts in this volume have been scaffolded substantially by Werner Callebaut, scientific director of the KLI. Werner, who has been a long-time friend to each of us and comes closer than any of us in matching the range of this volume. His philosophical and institutional leadership on the integration of evolution, cognition, and culture research, including exploration of new movements in evo–devo, modularity in complex systems, and naturalistic evolutionary approaches to epistemology, spurred our thinking and directed our attention to key breaking papers and ideas. Werner encouraged us to meet in Altenberg at KLI and to hold a workshop to pursue our interests. During the workshop, Werner pressed us on conceptual issues, for example, how Wimsatt’s generative entrenchment concept relates to material overlap in reproduction. It was a subtle means to get us to “risk deeper integration” (Callebaut et al. 2006) of our interests and ideas. We have tried to follow his lead and hope that this volume is a worthy return on his, and KLI’s, investment.

Reference

Callebaut, W., L. Caporael, P. Hammerstein, M. Laubichler, and G. Müller. 2006. Risking deeper integration. Biological Theory 1:1–3.