58 Françoise Longy
has been a co-evolution of the plants and of their cultural role. Human culture has adapted to cereal
biology just as cereals have adapted to human culture. (2007: 133)
He proposes calling “biological artifacts” items that, like cultivated wheat, “perform their
artifactual function by performing some of their biological functions” (2007: 130). As the
extracted quote shows, a biological artifact is an entity that possesses one or several func-
tions such that the functional effect has been both biologically selected for the sake of the
plant and artifactually controlled for the sake of humans.
Why does Sperber write “cultural/artifactual” at one point? What precision is achieved
by stating that such functions are not only biological and artifactual but also cultural? By
calling them “artifactual,” one stresses the fact that the features concerned have been
shaped largely by the control exerted by humans on the conditions of existence and repro-
duction of the plant. By adding that they are “cultural,” one stresses that mental representa-
tions have been involved in the various processes that have contributed to diffuse such
features. However, even if the two notions are not perfectly equivalent as we have seen
above and may serve to lay different stresses, they overlap to such a great extent that it is
diffi cult to distinguish them clearly.
Functions of biological artifacts are diffi cult to analyze because of various entangle-
ments. We have just identifi ed a conceptual entanglement between the notion of
“artifactual function” and the notion of “cultural function.” But there are also ontological
entanglements. The biological is entangled with the cultural/artifactual because each
side exploits the other. Humans exploit biological mechanisms to create artifacts better
suited to their needs. Plants exploit the fact that humans are able to create good conditions
for the reproduction of what they (humans) like. Plants take advantage not only of
the capacity humans have to understand and control natural phenomena but also of
their capacity to propagate ideas, behaviors, and entities via cultural means: imitation,
transposition, theft, trade, and so forth. The ontological entanglements explain why a
theoretical analysis will necessarily be complex and muddled. The complexity lies within
reality itself, in the fact that there are interdependencies among factors of different
sorts. However, at some level of reality, things look simple enough. There is one function,
and this function indicates one single causal relation. Relative to a particular sort of
entity, the assertion that feature X has function F means something quite straightforward:
there is a relation between having feature X and having the capacity to do F (or to
result in F) and this relation is what explains the existence or the diffusion of the
bearers of the X feature. Let us examine this more concretely by giving an example.
Suppose feature X is a particular ratio of carbohydrates to fi bers found in actual
cultivated wheat—in short, the CFR feature—and F is the property of being easily digest-
ible for humans; then the claim that feature X has function F will mean simply that most
cultivated wheat fi elds produce CFR corn because CFR corn is easy for humans to
digest.