Environmental Metaphysics
نویسندگان
چکیده
An environment is in first approximation a volume of space; it is a specific habitat, location, or site that is suitable or adequate for given purposes (of foraging, resting, hunting, breeding, nesting, grooming) in the life of an organism or group of organisms. This spatial notion of environment can be drawn closer to biological and ecological science by taking account of the pertinent physical attributes realized within given spatial regions. Each type of organism is associated with a certain array of environmental conditions, for example: degree of slope, exposure to sunlight, soil fertility, foliage density, size, proximity and type of predators, and so on. Following Hutchinson [6], we can conceive this array of conditions as determining a hypervolume in an abstract many-dimensional space. Every point or region in this hypervolume corresponds to a niche in the technical ecological sense: a state of the environment which permits the members of a given species to exist indefinitely. Biologists, of course, are interested, not in individual organisms and their environments, but rather in statistical laws and regularities, and thus also they are interested in genotypes and phenotypes rather than in genotokens and phenotokens. For the purposes of biological theorizing organisms
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