An organism is born with a history.
Some of that history is inside it.
Genes carry organisation from previous generations into the developing organism. They provide possibilities for how development can proceed.
But genes are not the only things that can carry a history forward.
The organism is also born into an environment that has already been changed by other organisms.
There may be a nest.
A burrow.
A path.
A territory.
A pattern of behaviour that other members of the population respond to.
The developing organism encounters a world that has already been organised.
Something has been inherited without being carried in the genome.
This is not inheritance in quite the same sense.
The organism does not receive another organism's genes through the environment.
It receives conditions for development that previous organisms have helped create.
And those conditions can matter.
A young animal can learn from the behaviour of others. It can acquire a response that was not encoded as a particular behaviour in its genes. It can enter a social world whose organisation has been accumulated through the activities of previous generations.
The organism inherits a developmental environment.
Human beings take this much further.
A child is born into a world of objects, practices, expectations, distinctions and meanings that existed before the child arrived.
Someone has already named things.
Someone has already built the house.
Someone has already invented the game.
Someone has already told the stories.
Someone has already developed ways of explaining what is happening.
The child encounters all of this as part of the world in which development takes place.
And much of it is semiotic.
The child therefore inherits an organisation of the environment that cannot be reduced to genes.
The inheritance is not simply a set of things.
It is a set of possibilities.
A word makes some meanings easier to develop.
A classification makes some distinctions available.
A practice makes some actions expected.
A story makes some relationships imaginable.
A language makes an enormous range of meanings available for further development.
None of these has to be genetically encoded to become part of the conditions under which a human being develops.
This gives inheritance another dimension.
Genes carry organisation across generations through biological reproduction.
Semiotic environments carry organisation across generations through participation.
The two forms of inheritance are not interchangeable.
But neither is development understandable if we consider only the first.
A child does not begin with genes and then encounter an unrelated cultural world.
The developing organism is already interacting with an environment that has been transformed by the activities of previous organisms.
And because that environment can change within a single generation, the possibilities available to development can change much faster than the genome.
A population can therefore accumulate changes in its developmental environment without waiting for genetic change to occur first.
One generation creates a new practice.
The next generation grows up within it.
The practice becomes ordinary.
Another generation modifies it.
The developmental environment has changed again.
History can therefore accumulate outside the genome.
And once that happens, evolution acquires another dimension.
The inherited biological organisation of the organism is interacting with an inherited organisation of its environment.
The organism develops from both.
But there is an important difference.
The environmental inheritance is not merely received.
It can be altered by the organism that receives it.
A child enters a world made by previous generations, develops within it, and then participates in making the world that the next generation will inherit.
Inheritance becomes recursive.
What is inherited becomes the material for further development.
What develops becomes part of what can be inherited.
And in humans, language makes this process extraordinarily powerful.
Language allows the organisation of experience to be carried into the developmental environment in forms that can be taken up, modified and passed on again.
The child therefore inherits more than a biological capacity for language.
The child inherits a world already organised through language.
And by becoming a language user, the child becomes part of the process that will organise the world for someone else.
The history of the organism is therefore no longer contained within the organism.
Part of its history is outside it.
It is in the environment.
It is in the practices of others.
It is in the meanings that have accumulated before the organism arrived.
And once an organism can inherit an environment that has itself been transformed by previous organisms, the distinction between adapting to an environment and transforming an environment begins to lose its simplicity.
The organism inherits the conditions of its development.
Then, through its development, it changes those conditions for others.
That is more than inheritance.
It is a cycle.
And the next question is what happens when that cycle becomes capable of changing both the organism and the environment together.
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