Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences

This paper aims to examine the evolutionary role of affordances, the possibilities for action available in our environments. There are two allegedly competing views for explaining the evolutionary role of affordances: the first is based on natural selection, the second is based on niche construction. According to the first one, affordances are resources that exert selection pressure. The second view claims that affordances are ecological inheritances in the organism’s niche that are the product of a previous alteration of the environment. Whereas there seems to be a mutually exclusive definition of affordances in each of these views, I argue in this paper that these are not competing, but complementary views. In this sense, affordances play the role of either resources or ecological inheritances depending on the temporal stage of the evolutionary process. I show this by analyzing how natural selection and niche construction affect each other even when their functioning is independent from each other. Taking this, if these two evolutionary mechanisms exert their power in parallel but at two different stages of the evolutionary history of a given econiche, then there is room to claim that affordances are understood as resources and as ecological inheritances at different times of the evolutionary history of the econiche. This dual aspect of affordances shows their evolutionary role.