The Affordance Landscape: The Spatial Metaphors of Evolution

Abstract

The adaptive landscape is a metaphorical device employed to depict the evolutionary change in a population or lineage undergoing natural selection. It is a powerful heuristic and didactic tool. This paper has two objectives. The first is to dig beneath the adaptive landscape in order to expose certain presuppositions about evolution concealed there. The second is to propose and motivate an alternative spatial metaphor, one that embodies a wholly different set of presuppositions. I develop the idea that adaptive evolution occurs on an ‘affordance landscape.’ The conception of adaptation—both the process and the product—that follows from adopting the affordance landscape metaphor is a significant departure from the conception of adaptation embodied in orthodox Modern Synthesis biology.