D01
D01
The role of individual internal states in niche choice, niche construction, and behavioural niche conformance
Ulrich Krohs
During the first funding period, Project D01 focused on the conceptual and explanatory issues of function and fitness in individualised niches from a general perspective. This generalised view will be specified in the second funding period, in which D01 aims at understanding possible fitness effects of internal states of individuals. The project thus scrutinises in a first step the functional roles of these states in behavioural decisions, and in a second step the relevance of individual differences in internal states for the evolutionary outcome of the mechanisms of niche choice, niche conformance and niche construction. The project will draw on the debate in analytical philosophy about internal states in reconstructing the biological application of the concept.
Internal states influence an individual’s actions. The impact of a particular internal state in a given situation can turn out to be advantageous or disadvantageous for the individual. Due to this evaluative aspect, the roles of internal states can be reconstructed as their biological functions. However, while the evolutionary relevance of the functions of physiological and behavioural traits are generally acknowledged, the functions of internal states are often overlooked in research. One reason for this might be that such states are often misunderstood as being necessarily conscious, in particular since they are usually called “emotions”, which might lead to misinterpretations because folk concepts of emotions take them to be conscious feelings. The application of the concept to humans and to non-human primates is generally accepted, but, given the misleading background, any application to other animals seems to be anthropomorphic. However, most of the concepts of emotion that contemporary analytic philosophy offers do not reduce them to feelings and not even link them to consciousness at all. This holds most prominently for evaluative and for motivational theories of emotion. In a similar vein, operationalised concepts of emotion, e.g., used in behavioural physiology of insects, allow for the ascription of emotions without the presupposition of consciousness.
The above-mentioned approaches will serve as the basis of the proposed project. The project will explore on the conceptually level how internal states (“emotions”) influence the match of the individual to its environment and how internal states become evolutionarily relevant via the mechanisms of niche choice, niche conformance and niche construction. The project also uses the case of the evolutionary relevance of emotions to discuss in a third step how some seemingly fundamental differences between the theoretical frameworks of the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis can be reassigned to the realm of empirical research.
