Entrenchment implies that physiological and developmental processes are not organism-bound but still organism-centric

摘要

Villalobos and Razeto-Barry argue that all living beings possess discrete bodies and that, as a consequence, embodied living beings are merely embedded in the environment surrounding them. The upshot of their analysis is that an extended conception of life is misguided. I fundamentally agree with their argument. The authors make their case by clarifying the conceptual scaffolding of the theory of autopoiesis that supposedly engenders the extended approach. I think the critical argument can be supported in a more straightforward way by showing that the biological fact of entrenchment (West-Eberhard 2003, pp. 500-503) does not imply an extension of the physical boundaries of the organism.