An organism develops in an environment.
At first, it seems natural to imagine the environment as something already there.
The organism has to cope with it.
It finds food.
Avoids danger.
Learns where to go.
Learns what to expect.
The environment sets the conditions.
The organism responds.
But what if the organism changes the environment?
Then the next organism does not encounter quite the same world.
The environment has changed.
And if that change affects development, the next organism develops differently.
That organism may then change the environment again.
The relation has become reciprocal.
The organism changes the environment.
The changed environment changes development.
Development changes what the organism can do.
What the organism can do changes the environment again.
The cycle has begun to evolve.
This is more than an organism adapting to a fixed world.
The world in which development occurs is itself being transformed by the organisms developing within it.
A nest changes the environment of the young that grow in it.
A path changes the possibilities available to those who follow it.
A social practice changes what the next generation encounters.
A learned behaviour can alter the behaviour of others, which alters the environment again.
In each case, the organism is not simply responding to the environment.
It is participating in its construction.
And the constructed environment becomes part of the developmental conditions for subsequent organisms.
The distinction between organism and environment therefore becomes less absolute.
Neither remains unchanged while the other adapts.
They are changing one another.
Human beings make this reciprocity extraordinarily visible.
We build houses, roads and cities.
We cultivate plants.
We create institutions.
We organise activities.
We make tools.
We create systems of signs.
And then we develop within the worlds we have made.
A child born into a city does not encounter the same environment as a child born before the city existed.
A child born into a literate culture does not encounter the same developmental possibilities as a child born before writing.
A child born into a language community encounters distinctions and meanings that previous generations have made available.
The environment has become part of the inheritance.
But it is also part of the process of change.
What human beings make changes the conditions under which subsequent human beings develop.
And what those human beings become capable of doing changes what they make.
The relation therefore becomes cumulative.
Previous organisms alter the environment.
The altered environment changes development.
Development produces new capacities.
Those capacities alter the environment again.
Over generations, the two histories become entangled.
The history of the organism cannot be separated neatly from the history of the environment in which the organism develops.
This is especially important when the environment becomes semiotic.
A physical structure can persist.
A tool can persist.
But a meaning can also persist.
A practice can be taught.
A distinction can be named.
A way of interpreting the world can become part of what a child learns to expect.
The environment can therefore carry not only the physical consequences of previous organisms, but some of their organisation of experience.
Language intensifies this process because it allows that organisation to become extraordinarily portable.
What one generation has learned can become part of the developmental environment of another.
And what the next generation develops can become part of the environment after that.
The environment is no longer merely the place where evolution happens.
It has become part of what evolves.
Not independently of the organisms within it.
With them.
This gives us a different picture of evolutionary change.
Evolution is not simply the accumulation of changes inside organisms while the world remains a passive backdrop.
The organism and its developmental environment can form a changing system.
Each alters the conditions of the other.
And once the environment itself carries the consequences of previous development, evolution can begin to involve the changing organisation of the relationship between organism and environment.
That is a much more complicated story than adaptation to a fixed world.
But it may also be a more accurate one.
For by the time human beings appear, the world into which a human being develops is already partly a product of human development.
The organism is born into an environment made by organisms like itself.
It develops there.
And then it helps make the environment for those who come next.
The organism and its environment have begun to acquire a shared history.
And now the question becomes unavoidable.
What kind of evolutionary process is possible when the developmental environment can itself carry, accumulate and transform the history of the organisms that inhabit it?
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