Developing Scaffolds:
An Introduction
We aim to make a substantive contribution to theoretical biology and, more specifically, to human evo–devo, including contributions to cognitive science, social theory, science and technology studies, and human development, broadly conceived. The contributors cut a conceptual swath through a range of empirical and philosophical studies so as to help tease out, recognize, and classify different forms of scaffolding. This volume makes 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. We explore scaffolding as a complementary perspective in the developmentalist tradition to neo-Darwinism, which offers few theoretical tools for culture and cognition. Because development appeared as a central concept among our contributors, and because our emphasis is on developing new ideas about scaffolding that are just beginning to be worked out, the title we adopted, Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition, reflects the framing, collection of data, analysis, and report of our research project laid bare.
The word scaffolding is both a noun and a verb; it names a structure and a process. The common meaning of scaffolding refers to a temporary structure of platforms and poles erected so that workers can build, repair, clean, or decorate a building. Biomedical engineers use this notion to describe an artificial structure for growing tissue formations. Scaffolding also refers to support in a different sense. In instructional research, scaffolding refers to an interaction framework, known as a zone of proximal development, typically of a child and a caregiver or teacher who supports the process or action of facilitating learning. Scaffolding is widespread, so widespread that its “attachment” to discourses in biology, culture, evolution, and human development indicates its centrality to processes of support and change of many kinds.
At the same time, however, scaffolding is a “missing concept,” perhaps because its primary virtue is that it is commonly temporary: it is often external, and either falls away or becomes assimilated to or part of the scaffolded relation. Short shrift is given to scaffolding in perspectives organized around developmental systems, modularity, or complex systems, which in some sense appear as self-contained, with a framework or access to all needed resources whether internally or externally contingent. A more highly analyzed and developed concept of scaffolding will highlight the role of temporal and temporary resources to development, broadly conceived, across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution.
The critical threads through the conceptions of scaffolding we use are reproduction, repeated assembly, and entrenchment. Items that are reproduced and repeatedly assembled can become entrenched early in a system and are thereby available to serve as scaffolding for later items, as a platform or as a constraint. Wimsatt (1986) originally conceived generative entrenchment to apply to the evolution of organisms with development and life cycles, including their cognition and behavior. Different elements (parts, properties, relations, processes, and activities) of the life cycle have adaptations occurring “downstream” of them. It is commonly true that things occurring earlier in development have more chance to acquire downstream dependencies and thus to be more deeply entrenched. Their greater evolutionary conservatism is reflected in von Baer’s (1828) law that earlier stages of embryos of diverse species look more alike than later stages. Wimsatt (1986) urged the reanalysis of “innate” phenomena in terms of generative entrenchment, which explains a large number of their supposed properties—species universality, earliness in development, generative role in producing other things, and the like.
Differential entrenchment, or relative developmental dependency, can be applied to the evolution of adaptive systems in other areas where there is no genetics, or in cases where there is no genetic information. Thus the concept of generative entrenchment reaches beyond the current scope of biology—in particular, to cognitive development (Wimsatt 1986; Dove 2012), the cultural evolution of ideas, organizations, material technology, and cultural institutions and norms (B. Arthur 2009; Wimsatt and Griesemer 2007; Wimsatt 1999, 2010). Here evolution is not driven by or readily correlated with genetic changes, but dependency relations are products of learning or technology and are relatively easy to study and to specify.
Reproduction and repeated assembly name ways in which more items that form lineages (genes, bodies, social groups, beliefs, artifacts) are produced. Lineages differ in kind, depending on whether the assembly process involves development, growth, or maintenance of organized systems and whether the development, growth, or maintenance depends on self- or environmental scaffolding. Scaffolding may change the dynamics of reproducing or repeatedly assembled systems depending on the character of the scaffold and its temporal relation to the assembling system.
Together, the reproduction, repeated assembly, and entrenchment of heterogeneous relations, parts, and processes provide an alternative, albeit complementary, to the neo-Darwinian population genetic basis for conceptualizing evolutionary change.
Our Methods
After a decade of some conversation and occasional exchange of papers, the coeditors started in earnest to integrate their three theoretical perspectives, briefly described later in this introduction. They had in common elements of evolution, development, and culture, stressed materiality, and were (and are) thematically related by topics such as the reproduction of forms (genes, organisms, groups, ideas, or artifacts), the scaffolding of behavior, and dynamics of changes over scales of action in groups. With the support and encouragement of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI), we organized the 23rd Altenberg Workshop, “Scaffolding in Evolution, Culture and Cognition,” in 2010. The goal of the workshop was to examine examples of scaffolding to further expand the concept so as to shed light on institutions, face-to-face groups, and individuals connecting generations in evolutionary, cognitive, and cultural domains. Scholars from a diverse range of disciplines came to share their concepts, research, and critiques, scaffolding our thinking about scaffolding. We looked to the workshop and subsequent papers as a collective enterprise that could yield insight and new understanding about how individuals, groups, artifacts, and institutions could be connected through relations of scaffolding; about what resonances existed among different scales of time and matter; and about how to integrate evolution, cognition, and culture across generations, ontogenies, and intellectual histories and wherever scaffolding is essential to the production of structures and processes, including those that themselves serve to scaffold.
In the following sections of this introduction, we sketch the background of intellectual resources that informed our projects and then describe the three perspectives we brought to the collective project. We end with a summary of how our contributors’ chapters scaffolded our thinking, which is elaborated in the brief integrative descriptions of the main parts of the volume.
Part I (“Toward Materiality: Three Perspectives”) continues the line of thinking in this chapter. These opening chapters describe the movement forward and articulation between our perspectives. Each perspective is expanded, partly as a result of the workshop and writing experience. Following part I are four parts of grouped papers, each preceded with a brief overview and introduction. We invited our authors for their strengths in their subjects; we did not ask them to conform their work to our ideal, but to share their conceptual standpoints and empirical data. The epilogue reports our findings, the interchapter scaffolding and emergent understanding of scaffolding that came out of the workshop. It’s not to be missed. We have avoided following the conventional way of imagining biology as a foundation for cognition, which then serves as a foundation for culture, in hopes that alternative groupings would reveal more about the conceptual links around reproduction, repeated assemblies, entrenchments, and groups. We hope that readers will find that they have their own alternative and generative ways of grouping—a sign of the success of our endeavors.
Background
The crucial challenge for any project of grand theorizing is empirical testability. However, there are always two main issues: first, different disciplines have differently institutionalized methodological commitments. Anthropologists and social historians, for example, require detailed ethnographic and historical narrative data, or “thick description.” Psychologists and sociologists tend to prefer “thin description,” where context is minimally characterized and controlled or randomized in quantitative experiments or surveys. Second, the terms and relations in the integrated theoretical structure may be unfamiliar, have geographies and time scales different from “real life,” consist of part/whole relationships, and be difficult to imagine or hook to more familiar conceptions. Thus, the conceptual framework for which we aim is intended to inspire and accommodate empirical work that can span different levels of analysis and connect various methodologies.
Of course, we are not the first to aim for such an integration (cf. Mesoudi et al. 2006). The two broad divisions of the human sciences, those concerned with the individual and those concerned with society, are not theoretically well-connected with an understanding of the relationships between human action, meaning, knowledge, and artifacts from eco–evo–devo perspectives. One of the earliest attempts is the population-genetics-inspired gene–culture coevolution or “dual inheritance” theories (Richerson and Boyd 2004). These jump off from the Darwinian insight that evolution is not a succession of idealized types but a process of differential reproduction in populations of broadly similar but individually different individuals, and that the reproduction process regenerates similarities with the parents in their offspring. (This is found in Campbell’s seminal 1965 paper on blind variation and selective retention in sociocultural systems and also in Lewontin’s 1970 review, which was equally seminal in population biology.)
Boyd and Richerson (1985) explicitly adopted Campbell’s perspective. They originally elaborated models inspired by population genetics, but in their later work (Richerson and Boyd 2004) they devote much more time to richer case studies of cultural differences and change, and their framework has influenced most of the best work since. Durham (1991), also inspired by Campbell, discusses both genetic changes which have been driven by cultural change (extended lactose tolerance and sickle-cell anemia) and also culturally and ecologically driven mating systems (e.g., polyandry in Tibet) which have genetic consequences. Durham shows that in cases like these attention to a variety of factors—demographic data, migratory movements, language and cultural groups with different agricultural and husbandry practices, ecological features with epidemiological implications, and elapsed time since various of these factors were initiated—are all crucial to understanding the distribution and spread of both cultural and biological traits and corresponding distributions of relevant gene and genotype frequencies for lactose intolerance and the sickle-cell trait.
Odling-Smee et al. (2003) offered additional insights. Although their niche construction theory is more broadly addressed to biological evolution, their basic insight is also central to any adequate theory of cultural evolution: actions of the organism on the environment are important in the creation of their own environment and evolution. Dawkins (1982) recognizes this much, but from a gene-centric perspective which cannot adequately represent or capture the dynamics of higher, and particularly human, social systems. Odling-Smee et al. go beyond Dawkins in recognizing that some of these factors are themselves heritable through channels external to the organism and also in seeing that the right unit of analysis for evolutionary problems includes this larger structured environment.
Andy Clark (1997) has been a pioneer in the elaboration and broader application of ideas of scaffolding. His book, Being There, is a variegated systematic argument for extended and embodied cognition. In this he begins with Vygotsky (1978) and Hutchins (1995) but draws heavily on organic design and on connectionist models of neural functioning in the brain—both older themes for him. But to this he now adds a rich exploitation of material, social, and ideational artifacts in support of his idea of embodied and embedded cognition (see also Wilson and Clark 2009). He argues that while the brain is in the head, the mind, depending on our training and the social and cultural context, can have a further reach. When stable and particularly interactive configurations of external scaffolding elements articulate with internal “pattern completion” processes, we have a new relational activity that defies the old inner-outer boundaries. In the expression and completion of the task such as using a pad and pencil for sketching an architectural drawing or working out a math problem, or when reasoning through a joint plan of action out loud with a colleague, the cognitive system (indeed the mind) can be seen as reaching out beyond the head to include these crucial elements.
This articulation of internal and external structure is striking for one mode of scaffolding in particular. Clark (1997, chapter 10) devotes special attention to language and modes of public and private symbolic articulation. This is an ideal topic for his concern with breaking down the barriers normally accepted between external and internal, subjective and public, and individual and social. Although originally seen as a tool of communication, Clark delineates a host of derivative functions and exaptive additions which can be seen as scaffolding and sometimes as exemplifying thought. Some exist already for spoken language, and some are more appropriate for written language, a pivotal invention for the explosive expansion of our culture. These include the following (1997, 201–207): use of external symbols to expand memory, of labels to simply encode more complex environments, and from them to simplify learning about the environments; to use language in coordinating actions, both with others, and when planning multiple actions, to organize when and how they are to be done. Planning in turn reduces the amount of on-line decision making required, and this in turn is facilitated by inner verbal recapitulation of plans, and the formulation of our ideas into compact readily transmissible packets to communicate them to others. He closes with an application of some of the preceding in his description of how higher-level organizational packets of text are themselves manipulated and rearranged (in the writing of his book).
Clark comes perhaps closest to covering the upper range of this book in his discussions of institutions in the context of economics as scaffolding human decision making—the fruit of his interactions with former colleague, institutional economist Douglass North. Chapter 9 of Being There draws on Clark’s contribution to North’s festschrift in 1997. That this interaction was two-way is reflected in North’s co-authored paper with Mantzavinos and Sharik (Mantzavinos et al., 2004), which rejects the hegemony of rational decision theory in favor of an account of cognitive functioning that reflects Clark’s influence and draws on scaffolding. Indeed, this paper is in many respects similar to the architecture for a theory of cultural evolution proposed in chapter 3 (Wimsatt, this volume), although it is differently developed.
Despite this rich discussion, however, Clark remains focused on individual cognition (however embodied and embedded) and thus does not try to characterize culture or its dynamics (see Tavory et al. or Gerson, this volume) or to develop scaffolding or cognition for groups or organizations (like Theiner or Caporael, this volume) or scaffolding for other units of selection, development, and evolution, like sub-parts or aspects of the organism (e.g., Newman, Griesemer, and Li, this volume) and segments of the society, institutions, or technologies (Evans, Murmann, Wimsatt, this volume). His focus brings him closer to others in the volume who primarily target activities of individuals (Allen, Heintz, Lyon, Martinez, Schank et al. and B. Wimsatt) though their different aims lead to divergent, though complementary accounts.
The inclusion of resources from an external structured environment is shared by developmental systems theory, which emerged from the seminal work of Oyama (1985) on the equal significance of recurrent environmental and genetic resources, and the view of Lewontin and Levins (1985) of the organism as a dialectical system where environment and genes are intercalated. Developmental systems theory was subsequently elaborated by many writers (Griffiths and Gray 1994; Oyama et al. 2001) in an assault against the “gene’s-eye view,” and the long-standing practice in population genetics of setting aside development and ecology from the modern synthesis. Wimsatt (1986) took a similar line in using generative entrenchment to analyze cases supposedly showing “innateness.” In 2001 he showed how generative entrenchment is a natural part of such a theoretical perspective—and is indeed central to any nontrivial evolutionary process including development or cultural evolution.
In addition to these resources concerned with how evolutionary theory can be aligned with culture and development, a number of our contributors referred to another tradition of scaffolding and development associated with Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky. We liked Georg Theiner’s historical introduction to this tradition (in his contribution to this volume) so much that we asked if we could move it here, to which he generously agreed. Georg discusses two significant ideas originating in the Vygotskian perspective. One is the idea of a “zone” for scaffolding, a “distance” between actual and potential development where scaffolding operates. The other is the early recognition of the significance (and broad definition) of artifacts in scaffolding.
Georg writes: As a concept of educational psychology, the notion of instructional scaffolding was first introduced in a seminal paper by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976), where it is taken to refer to the facilitating process by which a teacher helps a student to accomplish some task that would otherwise lie beyond the student’s cognitive, affective, or psychomotor reach. A scaffold in this sense is any resource, practice, or other mediating structure that is employed as part of this process. Like the physical scaffolding which is used to support the construction or repair of buildings, the cognitive scaffolding provided by the tutorial interactions between teacher and student is often intended to be temporary. A scaffold has served its purpose—and can thus be removed—once it has helped a novice to master the task at hand all by himself or herself. However, as the novice acquires the necessary expertise, he or she is bound to encounter other, more challenging tasks for which the student stands in need of further guidance. For certain tasks that are invariably difficult to master for our resource-limited biological brains, such as the creation of abstract art, doing long-term multiplication, or writing a dissertation, we can never entirely remove external scaffolding—be it the sketchpad, the word processor, or the Ph.D. advisor—without a significant dip in cognitive performance.
To resolve the noted ambiguity between the process and the vehicles of scaffolding, it will be helpful to distinguish between a psychosocial and a technological aspect of cognitive scaffolding. Both aspects were foreshadowed in the groundbreaking work of Belarusian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934).
The psychosocial aspect of scaffolding, as conceived by Wood et al., is closely related to Vygotsky’s more general notion of a zone of proximal development (Rogoff and Wertsch 1984). A “zoped” refers to “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Vygotsky 1978, 86). For instructional scaffolding to be maximally effective, it should occur within a person’s zoped—that is, somewhat, but not too much, in advance of their current level of psychological development. In their paper, Wood et al. describe several key functions of tutorial interactions that can promote a student’s learning success, such as the recruitment of the student’s interest in the task, establishing and maintaining an orientation toward task-relevant goals, highlighting critical features of the task that the student might overlook, demonstrating how to achieve goals, and helping to control frustration.
The second aspect of scaffolding highlights the mediating role of tools in support of human cognition, which Vygotsky (1978) considers as the driving factor in the cultural evolution of human intelligence. For Vygotsky, the main epistemic effect of tools is to shift our reliance from (what he calls) elementary psychological functions to so-called higher psychological functions, by transforming the way in which human beings cognitively engage with their environment. As Vygotsky and Luria (1993, 169) put it, “[c]ultural man does not have to strain his vision to see a distant object—he can do it with the help of eyeglasses, binoculars, or a telescope; he does not have to lend an attentive ear to a distant source, run for his life to bring news,—he performs all these functions with the help of those tools and means of communication and transportation that fulfill his will. All the artificial tools, the entire cultural environment, serve to ‘expand our senses’ [….]”
Of course, tools do not merely serve to expand our senses but have greatly amplified our entire cognitive repertoire. Building on Vygotsky’s insights into the mediating role of tools, including the ways in which they can restructure the social relations between people, Norman (1993, 17) has dubbed as cognitive artifacts “those artificial devices that maintain, display, or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function and that affect human cognitive performance.” Cognitive artifacts, according to Norman, enhance our cognitive performance because they allow us to distribute cognition in space, over time, and across people. In particular, human cognition can be seen as distributed in space, insofar as environmental scaffolds transform the nature of the cognitive tasks which our biological brains and bodies have to perform; over time, insofar as the outcomes of earlier stages of cognitive processing transform the task demands during later stages; and over people, insofar as the division of cognitive labor in a group transforms the nature of the tasks which each member has to perform (Donald 1991; Hutchins 1995; Hollan et al. 2000; Perry 2003).
Mark Bickhard is a strong advocate for the centrality of notions of scaffolding to developmental psychology (1992, 2005, 2007). His work was influential in shaping our thoughts and plans for the workshop. In his view, conventional development accounts of representation and cognition as “encoding” context that already exists assumes a passive and backward-looking actor. Instead, Bickhard endorses an interactionist view of representation as active and forward-looking, focusing on anticipation of possible future actions and interactions. This “process ontology” is also congenial to a recursive notion of constructive learning: complex organisms—we could substitute here “complex reproducers”—can “make use of prior constructions as resources and components for variation and construction” (2005, 168). This recursive property of complex cognitive organisms or systems leads directly to the phenomenon of developmental entrenchment: “The sensitivity and even dependency of constructions on prior constructions in recursive constructivism is what constitutes development. Learning focuses on in-the-moment constructions; development focuses on dependencies in trajectories of construction over time” (ibid).
Bickhard addresses the functional nature of scaffolding, as a means not only for task completion, but for the acquisition of “less context-dependent abilities” (1992, 35). Scaffolding provides a bridge to otherwise inaccessible developmental states through its effects on selection. “Simply, constructions that don't work are selected out, and if too much construction is required before any product of that construction will work, then it is correspondingly unlikely that that particular version of complicated constructions will happen to occur such that the ‘distant’ point of stability will be reached. If there are no nearby points of stability, the system will be stuck” (ibid). A key link between selection and development is that scaffolding mutes, blocks, or suspends selection pressures so that developmental construction “that would not otherwise be functionally successful—that would otherwise be selected-out—can become successful, and thereby stable,” relative to the altered environment that imposed the selection pressure. Thus, Bickhard defines functional scaffolding as “precisely the creation of such bracketed trajectories of potential development through ‘artificially’ created nearby points of stability. In other words, it is only partially correct that the function of scaffolding is to allow the child to accomplish something that he or she could not otherwise accomplish alone—it also allows the child to develop further competencies through being provided with such bracketings of ‘normal’ selection pressures. It is this further variation and selection development, made possible by the context-dependent successes, that makes scaffolding a critical aspect of the development of less context-dependent abilities” (ibid).
In addition to Theiner’s and Bickhard’s attention to scaffolding zones and to artifacts in support of cognition, there are others whose work is also salient in recent turns to thinking about development, embodiment, artifacts, group size, and coordination more generally (Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010; Gamble 2007; Gilbert and Epel 2009; Ingold 2000; Rogoff 2003; Sterelny 2012). Like our contributors, they also come from a wide range of disciplines. Perhaps one of the most exciting developments is an emergent scaffolding among humanities, arts, and sciences, where potential expertise and methodologies are currently being explored in areas traditionally unaligned with science, including phenomenology and hermeneutics, dance, and artistic experience (Esrock 2010; Sheets-Johnstone 2011; Sgorbati and Weber 2008; Thompson 2007). We want to use their resources, too, as scaffolding to bring our perspectives together, but we could not figure out how to fit them all in one book.
Three Perspectives
We begin with a fuller description of three complementary approaches. The reproducer perspective is concerned with development and inheritance systems, of which genes are one possible part. The core configuration approach posits a model of face-to-face group structure and its influence on the evolution of a fundamentally social human cognition. Generative entrenchment shows how the developmental architecture of reproducing adaptive systems leads naturally to differential processes of stasis and change, including constraints on change that are contingent—but hugely significant—for later events, be they human development, the design of artifacts, or institutional or cultural change. These approaches share several features: a rejection of methodological individualism; an evolutionary point of view; concern with issues of spatial and temporal scale as they impact processes of continuity and change; recursive expression; cultural evolution; and dynamics recurring at different levels of analysis. Each perspective on its own is novel, and each would be enhanced by drawing on the others.
The Reproducer Perspective on Units of Evolution
The reproducer perspective is designed as an alternative to the gene’s-eye view in biology (Griesemer 2000a, b, c; 2002a, b; 2005). It complements structuralist assumptions that Darwin’s principles of heritable variation in fitness can apply at any level of a preexisting hierarchy of biological organization (Lewontin 1970; Wimsatt 1980). It also complements functionalist distinctions of replicators and interactors, with replicators fundamentally like modern DNA (high fecundity, longevity, copying fidelity) (Dawkins 1976; Hull 1988). In contrast, the reproducer perspective is designed as a framework for explaining the emergence of new levels of organization and the evolutionary origin of these properties as well as their stability, maintenance, and persistence (cf. Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995).
Reproduction in general is the multiplication of entities with a material overlap of parts between parents and offspring, that is, where parts of parents become parts of offspring either directly or through chains of material continuity (Griesemer 2000a, b, c; 2002b). Reproduction is not only transmission of form—it is a flow of matter, which can act to yield a greater robustness of transmission. At least some parts that flow from parents to offspring must be organized as mechanisms of development. A mechanism of development is a part conferring the capacity to acquire the capacity to reproduce. This recursive structure expresses the intertwining of heredity and development. Heredity is the correlation between parents and offspring due to reproduction. Reproduction transfers the capacity to develop. Development is the acquisition of the capacity to reproduce. As long as there is a null condition somewhere in the system that can originate with the capacity to reproduce without needing to acquire that capacity through development, then reproduction can operate recursively. For example, complex organisms can reproduce only after their organs develop. Organs develop typically when their cells reproduce. Cells reproduce only when their internal organelles and components develop. And these only develop when molecules multiply. Since molecules can multiply by chemical autocatalysis without development, they provide a biological null condition for organism reproduction as a recursive process. A simple reductive collapse to autocatalytic molecules is blocked by the shifting scaffolding resources at higher levels in which developmental processes occurring on levels above molecules depend on still higher-level interactions. For example, differentiation into specific cell types usually involves cell and tissue interactions with other cell and tissue types; knowledge of all the autocatalytic reaction cycles inside each cell is insufficient to explain development or its dynamics.
Inheritance is reproduction of evolved mechanisms of development in which component parts evolved to play developmental roles, including both genetic and epigenetic inheritance systems (Jablonka and Lamb 1995), and is applicable to behavioral and symbolic systems (Avital and Jablonka 2000; Jablonka and Lamb 2005). Fine-tuned adaptive evolution is facilitated by opportunities for specialization, division of developmental labor, ecological diversification, and stabilization of new levels of reproduction in interaction with environments. Genetic inheritance systems include the further innovation of evolved coding mechanisms of development.
The Repeated Assembly of Core Configurations
Similar to the reproducer perspective, the concepts of repeated assembly and core configurations came out of the search for an alternative to the gene’s-eye view in the human sciences. Traditional neo-Darwinism simply lacked conceptual tools for understanding development and environment at the phenotypic level. Consequently, references to “adaptations” were fraught with overtones of genetic determination. At the same time it reinforced widespread assumptions in both the social sciences and folk psychology that human nature is more or less rational and individually self-interested (Kitcher 1985), with sociality explained as an extension of a Machiavellian intelligence. Few such claims about human psychological traits could bear the “burdens of proof” required by neo-Darwinism (Lloyd 1999).
Given such starting assumptions, sociobiology’s “central problem” was the evolution of altruism. Although an interesting and generative problem for population geneticists, it was arguably the wrong one. The “central problem” in social life is coordination (Caporael et al. 1989; Caporael and Baron 1997; Sterelny 2012). Even a melee or a war requires humans to coordinate the place, body movements, and time just to land the first blow. More significantly, humans are obligately interdependent, unable to reproduce and survive to reproductive age without a group (Brewer and Caporael 2006) even—indeed more so—in a technological world. Ours is a group-living species, a product of the coevolution of genetic endowment, social structure, and culture (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Flinn et al. 2005; Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010). The gene’s-eye view addresses these issues awkwardly at best.
Repeated assembly (Caporael 1997, 2003) was proposed as an alternative evolutionary approach, one consistent with traditional Darwinism, but at a higher level of analysis. Because the observation of recurrence is in large part the reason researchers turned to evolutionary explanations, it seemed a reasonable place to start. Repeated assembly refers to recurrent entity–environment relations composed of hierarchically organized, heterogeneous components having differing frequencies and scales of replication. This mouthful of a definition attempts to stitch repeated assembly to multilevel selection theory. Evolutionary processes operate over multiple levels of hierarchical organization—macromolecules, genes, cells, organisms, and even groups (Buss 1987; Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995; Sober and Wilson 1998). It also adopted an orientation from developmental systems theory: organisms are the product of multiple resources, including genes, the organism’s own activity, and a variety of external resources. Genes are among multiple necessary resources, which can include centrosomes from the sperm, maternal information in the egg, a language environment, a host of artifacts, and persistent regularities such as constancies of the atmosphere. Thus, repeated assembly provides a framework for analysis of a broad range of entities including genes, organisms, groups, practices, and artifacts.
The core configuration model is a narrative (and highly idealized) model about structural dynamics (Caporael 1997). The model posits that ecology and morphology have constrained humans to living in face-to-face groups for much of their prehistory and, until recently, their history. Consequently, groups have become a significant interface between individual and habitat. Core configurations are a conjunction of embodied form, size, and task within face-to-face groups. The overall selective advantage of evolution for sociality is coordination of activity and the acquisition, reproduction, and maintenance of resources, including information, knowledge, and practices within and between generations. The overarching hypothesis of the model is that human mental systems should have coevolved with core configurations, which in turn are grounded in the interrelations of body, tasks, ecology, and culture of evolving humans.
The model proposes four core configurations based on group size and “modal tasks” that are plausibly continuous from human prehistory through the present and afford the coevolution of capacities that enable the recurrence of the task. For example, a dyad is a core configuration with a group size of two and modal tasks that include interaction with an infant. Core configurations scaffold certain capacities, such as finely tuned microcoordination (e.g., joint attention, rhythmic patterns, pointing) that develops in infant–caregiver engagements but can be seen in interactions with some artifacts that require “careful handling,” as well. Other configurations are task groups (four to seven individuals), demes (twenty-five to fifty individuals), and macrodemes, which are collections of demes. These core configurations are generalizations from the foraging parties, bands, and macrobands of hunter-gatherers studied by anthropologists and the “demic structure of science” (Hull 1988). The overarching hypothesis is that unique aspects of human mental systems would have evolved in groups and should correspond to features of modal tasks characteristic of configurations, which in turn are grounded in the interrelations of body, tasks, ecology, and culture of evolving humans (Caporael 2007).
Configurations provide a context or niche for tasks or activities that are specific to that level of organization; each group configuration affords functional possibilities and coordination problems that do not exist at other levels. Configurations are “core” because they recur ontogenetically as a developmental system, in the engagements and habits of day-to-day life, and presumably in human evolutionary history.
There are, of course, “noncore” groups in modern life: self-organizing demic structures (e.g., of scientists [Hull 1988]) which may form group structures approximating core configurations and tasks associated with them. Nevertheless, regardless of momentary dynamics of structure, whether solitary or as part of a group, our cognitive engagement with the world is one that has developed and evolved in the context of interdependent group life. Thus the core configurations model is meant to inhabit the fairly large theoretical space between the methodological individualism of neo-Darwinism and the methodological collectivism of environmental determinists—between individually rational self-interest (though with satisficing and other relevant complexities, rather than with the unbounded information and agency of traditional rational decision theory) and methodological collectivism with colonized consciousnesses.
Generative Entrenchment and Cultural Evolution
Consider an adaptive structure generated from a smaller number of elements to make a larger system. We tend to think of the relation between genes and phenotype as like this. Or consider a set of axioms and the (much larger) range of results generated from them. In both cases we oversimplify, “deleting the work.” We need to take account of what cells do to make genes productive, and of mathematicians and students to explore the different applications of the axioms, gradually extending their range to new kinds of cases. Such “generative” systems will have some parts with a greater and more varied involvement than others in the production of the larger system. This property of differential entrenchment is very robust: it is “generic” (overwhelmingly probable, in the sense of Kauffman 1993 or statistical thermodynamics). However, it is doubly robust. Even if you start in the wrong place, selection will drive you there: increased evolving asymmetry of contributions should occur spontaneously from a totally symmetrical state (Wimsatt and Schank 1988; Wimsatt 2001). A developmental process with this asymmetry will generate differential rates of evolutionary change among parts of the system because parts that have widespread and diverse impacts are also far more likely to cause major malfunctions if changed. Evolution is skewed toward changing things that don’t matter much. For evolution to occur, we don’t need variation to be skewed in its production, though that too happens in culture, and as we now know, in biology (W. Arthur 2004). However, with or without this, we just need some changes to be more likely to be seriously deleterious or lethal than others. (In such systems we can make probabilistic predictions of directions of evolutionary change without any knowledge of the genetics—or, as for culture, without any relevant genetics!) We need not ignore the genetics of course (Schank and Wimsatt 1988; Wimsatt and Schank 1988, 2004). The results confirm the above intuitions, and a lot else.
These predictions aren’t foolproof (and neither are the genetic ones!). However, we can understand and begin to analyze the kinds of factors that make such predictions break down, and they do so in systematic ways—like change in a “deep” feature. Thus relationships that either regulate or canalize features of a system may protect system features from being affected by “deep” changes that would otherwise affect them. Redundancy and excess capacity can prevent system failures (Wimsatt and Schank 1988; Barlow and Proschan 1981) and occur spontaneously in biology (e.g., “tandem duplications” in genetics) or social systems (bringing more people than necessary to accomplish a task). A deep difference between cultural and biological systems is the richer and more powerful cultural toolbox of heuristic adaptations for making deep modifications (with far-reaching implications) and getting away with it (Wimsatt and Griesemer 2007). These too deserve closer analysis.
Two features predictable from generative entrenchment are particularly noteworthy. First, things that get relatively fixed in cultural systems tend both to play a larger generative role and to be protected from falsification or rejection in other ways. These are properties of systems we associate with norms, conventions, and standards. Generative entrenchment appears to give a handle on some of these properties. This gives generative entrenchment a potentially powerful edge in explaining features of systems that are curious hybrids of normative and descriptive. Second, we tend to layer newer features on older ones (even if creativity and revolutionary change will occasionally upset applecarts) and to broaden the application of things we already have readily in hand. Thus (1) we will tend to accumulate contingencies of structure, behavior, procedures, technology, and symbolic culture, and (2) those that become quite common (possibly even standardized) may accumulate additional layers of contingent adaptations or tweakings or co-options by the same process. Repetitions of this cycle should generate a kind of fractal order of contingencies on multiple scales of generality and importance. Gaddis (2001) notes this fractal order as central to historical explanation. We feel such fractal richness may generate the feeling of an unanalyzable richness or “thick description” characteristic of culture (Wimsatt 2001; Wimsatt and Griesemer 2007). Advocates of thick description traditionally invoke intentionality. However, when one is focusing on cultural peculiarities, intentionality functions as a generator of contingency, and we are back to where we started: culture, whatever else it is, is characterized by a rich hierarchy of contingencies, and that is just what is predicted by generative entrenchment acting with locally adaptive processes to constantly modulate contingencies with smaller scale differences and to occasionally co-opt them for new ends which can lead in larger (but still contingent) directions.
Scaffolding Our Chapters
What we initially found in these workshop papers follows.
In all its senses, scaffolding refers to (1) facilitation of a process that would otherwise be more difficult or costly without it, which (2) tends to be temporary—an element of the maintenance, growth, development, or construction process that fades away, is removed, or becomes “invisible” even if it becomes assimilated and remains structurally integral to the product. All kinds of scaffolding are relational: they connect, span, support, or interface disparate elements across different time and size scales; they provide usable developmental contexts and may serve only in some circumstances or for some actors and not for others. Scaffolds may differ in their generality—in the range of kinds of things they can act to scaffold or in the agents or circumstances under which they can do so—that is, their target zones of proximal development. However, being very general in application or conditions of application does not make scaffolds any less essentially relational.
What is not scaffolding? One feature would be a process that lacks productive resistance or challenge. For example, where two or more processes are incommensurable or disengaged, there is no scaffolding relation because there is no resistance that facilitates an otherwise more difficult or costly result.
At the workshop, contributors wrestled with resonances and dissonances among their papers, which helped scaffold the integration of many perspectives through the productive resistances they afforded. Three categories were especially salient.
Artifact scaffolding Artifacts can scaffold acts/actions/events when they make them possible, feasible, or easier than they otherwise would have been. Of course, to count as artifacts, objects must be made or taken as such by agents. No agency, no artifacts.
Infrastructure scaffolding Some artifacts or artifact types have the character of infrastructure—objects that persist on a much longer time scale than typical artifact scaffolding interactions such that they can be commonly regarded as parts of the environment or ‘‘niche’’ in which an action takes place.
Developmental agent scaffolding Artifacts and infrastructure function as scaffolding when agents and their targets respond and cooperate in such a way that they in fact grow, differentiate, learn new skills, or acquire new capacities that would have been more difficult or impossible to acquire or do so with less cost or danger than they otherwise would have.
Maintenance, Growth, and Development
Cross-cutting the previous categories was a distinction between maintenance, growth, and development that sorts processes central to the operation of repeated assembly, reproduction, and generative entrenchment. Maintenance, growth, and development may all be plausible functions or goals for scaffolding interactions, giving us nine categories for thinking about scaffolding with development as an important nexus for theoretical integration.
Development is a focus of our theoretical attention because of this intersection; mapping the entire space marked out by the cross-classification of scaffolding interactions in terms of artifact, infrastructure, and agency on the one hand and maintenance, growth, and development on the other hand is a challenge for future research. Adding the three traditional levels of analysis—biological, cognitive, and cultural—gives us a rich scheme for displaying and deploying participants’ contributions.
We found that development plays a special, but undertheorized, role in accounts of biological evolution, cognition, and cultural change. This is a role that Caporael, Griesemer, and Wimsatt each try to express through their theoretical perspectives on the repeated assembly of core configurations, reproducers, and generative entrenchment, which they aim to integrate through consideration of scaffolding.
Considerations of development can be expanded beyond applications to human bodily, cognitive, and social development and functioning. Introducing developmental considerations into theoretical perspectives on evolution, for example, raises questions about the character of change at a variety of time and size scales, and in what ways the entrenchment of some generative features in cognitive and cultural processes resemble generative entrenchment in biological evolution.
Not all scaffolding processes are easily distinguished as developmental in character. Intuitively, if the builders’ scaffold is used to wash the windows of a bank, that’s maintenance (both of the light transmission capacity of the windows and of the reputation of the bank). If it is used to put a clock on the front of the bank building, then it is being used for developmental purposes: to give the bank’s facade a function or capacity it didn’t have—telling passersby the time and conveying the image of the bank as a civic institution in a new way. But what about garbage pickup every week? Maintenance seems more different from development than it really is. For dynamic systems, maintenance sustains a steady state, that is, it preserves organization in the face of stress, deterioration, and change, so maintenance is a change operation. We can think of growth as processes for changing size or status without change in organization (in relevant respects, degrees, or scales) and development as processes for changing organization.
Developmental scaffolding is special not only because it represents both a thing and a process. Development pertaining to organisms, cultures, or lineages implies generative entrenchment: differential change or transformation productively constrained by earlier development. Hence, development may be considered a connecting “hinge” between the use of various resources and the artifacts, infrastructure, and agents used in ways that constitute scaffolding interactions.
Scaffolding Emergent Interactions on Scaffolding
Participants in the KLI workshop made use of scaffolding in many of the senses discussed above. These uses pointed to a wide range of considerations of scaffolding structures. These include artifacts, infrastructure and developmental agents. Infrastructure in which many elements of the environment of scaffolding interactions may all function as a basis for enriching, extending, or distributing action and cognition. This can range from simple hand axes in ancestral cultures to institutions to Internet tools for scientists that broaden individual research horizons while they narrow disciplinary horizons. Developmental agents or agency are sometimes represented in avowedly false scientific models of agents. False models concerned parents aiding skill acquisition in children, humans interacting in a division of task labor within social groups, and even stages of development that form the basis upon which subsequent developmental events are facilitated. The variety of events was considerable: memory abilities later in life, mental mechanisms that facilitate the historical transformation of scientific concepts, stress responses and developmental modules of organisms, and scientific models for understanding phenomena.
Finally, in some cases, participants used similar senses of scaffolding in disparate ways, putting their own analyses of the rich case studies they put before us in tension with ours, which sometimes led to productive resistance. These disagreements or tensions were highly productive—we drew upon our workshop participants’ hard work to provide us with intellectual engagements that scaffold our joint theoretical framework. Together, they facilitated a theoretical perspective that would be much more difficult or costly to produce without their help. The resistances—when used within the cooperative framework we tried to foster in the workshop—support our development of a shared understanding of biology, cognition, and culture—and are a sign that our efforts to construct the scaffolding for a new, joint perspective may be working. “No pain, no gain” is a slogan that applies to such intellectual endeavors no less than to physical workouts to develop the body.
The rest of the book is divided into five parts. As mentioned earlier, we avoided the temptation to use the traditional framework that would have had us organize the work by familiar levels: evolution/biology, cognition, and culture. Instead, we organized them by topics that would be productive for thinking about developing scaffolds and their emergent characteristics as the papers were read by members of our workshop audience. The first part consists of our chapters, written at the end of our experience of the workshop, the editing, and the ongoing discussions we shared. Each of our perspectives have been better realized and altered compared to when we started. In part II, “Scope and Scale,” the papers by Stuart Newman, James Evans, and Jeff Schank and his colleagues Christopher May and Sanjay Joshi raise a question about multilevel organization in general: are there processes in nature and social life that recur at different scales or organization? Those in part III began at the KLI workshop with the heading “Generativity and Entrenchment,” but as the topic took shape with the papers by Pamela Lyon, Christophe Heintz, and Georg Theiner, issues were raised about boundaries, possibly at different levels of cognition—hence, a new topic title for part III, “Generativity, Entrenchment, and Boundaries.” In part IV, “Granularity and Reciprocality,” Colin Allen, Sergio Martínez, and Elihu Gerson “materialize” individuals and institutions, illustrating differences in “grain” between individuals and institutions as units of analysis, which is a difference that nevertheless implies some kind of reciprocality between the two, even if reproduction and development by one is invisibly “held constant” by the other. This topic is continued in the last section, part V, “Reproduction and Development,” by Peter Murmann, Shu-Chen Li, Barbara Wimsatt, and Iddo Tavory and his colleagues, Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg. In effect, this set of papers, which span development of brains, careers, corporations, and culture, cycles back to scope and scale, as well as through the other parts emerging in the workshop and the book, highlighting the ubiquity and the role of development noted earlier in this chapter.
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