356 Species
would be opaque to us. However, any biologist would know that we do share a
Lebensform with lions, and indeed all mammals, and more distally, all vertebrates,
and so forth. And so, if we could speak lion, we would understand what he was say-
ing to that degree of evolutionary relatedness.^54
The notion of a form of life has recently been applied to species by the neo-
Aristotelian ethicist, Roland Sandler,^55 as part of a justification of Aristotelian
virtue ethics based upon the natural flourishing of organisms (especially humans,
of course). Leaving aside the ethical arguments, this is intriguing. What would it
mean to say a species is a form of life? In the ordinary sense, that is a truism, but
a Lebensform is much more than its appearance. A Lebensform is the sum total of
the relations of the individual to its community, to its environment, and between its
needs and parts, leading to typical development. In the general sense required for
biology, the Lebensform of a species is the interrelations of members of the popula-
tion with each other and with the ecological context and history of that population.
Any organism is a developmental system. That is to say, the outcomes of its devel-
opment are not predetermined merely by its genes (genetic determinism is a kind of
preformationism) but also by the environment in which it develops to maturity and
further reproduction.^56 Susan Oyama wrote:
What shapes species-typical characters is not formative powers but a developmental
system, much of which is bequeathed to offspring by parent and/or arranged by the
developing organism itself. The same is true of atypical ones, which may result from
developmental systems that are novel in some respect; an aberrant climate or diet may
“play” on the genome in a different way, a mutation may eventuate in altered stimulus
preferences or metabolic processes, thus altering the effective environment, etc.^57So, the issue with what makes a life-form is not that there is an “essential” set
of biological properties in a given organism, but that the organismal outcome will
depend on the interplay between endogenous and exogenous properties: genes,
somatic inheritance, the abiotic environment, food source availability at different
developmental typical stages, parental investment, and so forth. In an approach
named “niche construction,” several biologists have argued that preceding genera-
tions construct aspects of the organismic environment that can be usefully seen as
inheritance for the organism, such as trackways, nests, cultural behaviors, and so on
for animal species.^58 Thus, in addition to the usual gene + environment = phenotype
“interactionist consensus,”^59 there arises a complex system of feedback loops and
(^54) Wittgenstein was notoriously underwhelmed about evolutionary theory: “Darwin’s theory has no
more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science.” Wittgenstein 1922, 4.1122.
(^55) Sandler 2007. I do not concur with Sandler that natural good is the Lebensform of a species, as it
implies a natural state model of the evolution of each species. I appreciate Jay Odenbaugh provid-
ing me with this reference, and see his response to this approach which gives further references:
Odenbaugh 2017.
(^56) Griffiths and Gray 1994, Griffiths and Knight 1998, Griffiths and Stotz 2013.
(^57) Oyama 2000, 139.
(^58) Webb et al. 2002, Day et al. 2003, Odling-Smee et al. 2003. See philosophical commentary on this
view: Griffiths 2002, Okasha 2005, Barker 2008.
(^59) Kitcher and Sterelny 1988, Sterelny and Griffiths 1999, §5.3.