The Senior Common Room of St Anselm's was enjoying one of those pale mornings in which the weather seemed to have reached no definite opinion concerning itself. Professor Quillibrace sat with tea and a small collection of biscuits arranged with unsettling geometric precision. Mr Blottisham had already occupied the armchair nearest the fire and was speaking with the enthusiasm of a man racing ahead of his own understanding. Miss Elowen Stray sat beside the window with notebook in hand.
"Entirely obvious matter today," announced Blottisham. "Organisms live in environments. Fish in water, birds in air, dons in sherry. One could hardly wish for a more satisfactory arrangement."
Quillibrace looked up mildly.
"Could one not?"
"No. Environment surrounds organism. Organism responds to environment. Entire business perfectly straightforward."
Elowen tilted her head.
"Though that seems to assume the environment is a kind of container."
Blottisham waved a hand.
"Naturally. Things exist in things all the time. Tea in cups. Fish in oceans. Students in despair."
Quillibrace stirred his tea.
"Mr Blottisham is displaying what one might call the metaphysics of containment."
"The what?"
"The quiet conviction that reality consists of things placed inside larger things. A surprisingly durable habit."
Blottisham frowned.
"I fail to see the difficulty."
"The difficulty," said Quillibrace, "is that biology itself keeps refusing to cooperate."
Blottisham blinked.
"In what way?"
Quillibrace folded his hands.
"Consider an organism. One generally imagines a bounded object confronting an external world."
"Precisely."
"But where exactly does the organism stop?"
Blottisham stared.
"At the edges."
"Remarkable."
"The edges are generally where things stop."
Quillibrace nodded thoughtfully.
"A bold proposal. Unfortunately biology appears not to have received the memorandum."
Elowen smiled.
"Because organisms continuously exchange matter and energy with what we call their environment?"
"Quite so."
Quillibrace nodded.
"Food enters. Heat enters and leaves. Oxygen enters. Waste departs. Signals arrive and depart. Microbial populations migrate in and out continuously."
Blottisham frowned.
"Yes, but that merely proves organisms interact with environments."
Quillibrace looked almost sympathetic.
"And there arrives the classical assumption."
"I wasn't aware I had made one."
"People rarely are."
He took a sip of tea.
"'Interaction' assumes two already-complete things meeting one another from opposite sides of a boundary."
Blottisham sat upright.
"And that is wrong?"
"Not entirely wrong. Merely suspiciously tidy."
Elowen leaned forward.
"Because organism and environment may not begin as independent entities at all?"
Quillibrace inclined his head.
"Very good, Miss Stray."
Blottisham looked distressed.
"I'm losing the organism."
"You needn't panic," said Quillibrace. "The organism remains available for ordinary use."
"Excellent."
"It simply loses its status as an ontological atom."
Blottisham looked as though he had just been informed that his furniture had become philosophical.
Quillibrace continued:
"Relationally speaking, environment is not a container surrounding life."
He paused.
"It is a structured field of constraints within which organismal forms and environmental forms become stabilised together."
Silence.
Blottisham blinked twice.
"I understood every individual word."
Elowen looked thoughtful.
"So temperature, resources, predators, seasonal cycles and ecological structures are not external conditions acting on organisms?"
"Precisely."
"They are elements within the same relational field through which biological forms become actualised?"
"Exactly."
Blottisham looked alarmed.
"Then what becomes of adaptation?"
Quillibrace looked pleased.
"An excellent question."
Blottisham brightened.
"I had assumed so."
"The classical story says environments exist first and organisms adapt themselves to them."
"Naturally."
"But relationally, neither side arrives complete."
Blottisham's expression weakened.
Quillibrace continued gently:
"Niches are not empty rooms awaiting tenants."
Elowen nodded slowly.
"They emerge through repeated couplings between biological forms and environmental constraints."
"Quite."
Blottisham stared into the middle distance.
"So organisms do not move into niches..."
"No."
"...and environments do not merely impose conditions..."
"No."
"...and adaptation is not one thing adjusting itself to another thing..."
"No."
Blottisham looked increasingly pale.
"What, then, is occurring?"
Quillibrace considered.
"The gradual stabilisation of compatible relational configurations across time."
Silence again.
Blottisham frowned at the fire.
"Good heavens."
Elowen looked amused.
"What is it, Mr Blottisham?"
He shook his head slowly.
"I appear to have spent my entire life imagining creatures wandering around inside giant biological storage containers."
Quillibrace nodded.
"A common difficulty."
Blottisham looked mournful.
"I had mentally furnished them, too."
Quillibrace adjusted his spectacles.
"The trouble with containers, Mr Blottisham, is that they eventually begin containing explanations as well."
"And that is bad?"
"Frequently."
Elowen closed her notebook.
"So the environment isn't where life happens."
Quillibrace smiled faintly.
"No."
He lifted his teacup.
"It is one of the ways life becomes possible."
Blottisham stared silently at his own tea for several moments.
Then:
"I should like it recorded that I now feel considerably less outside my environment than I did an hour ago."
Quillibrace nodded.
"Progress frequently begins with the disappearance of an outside."
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