John Brockman, The third culture beyond the scientific revolution, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995.

The extended phenotype allows that cascade of causal arrows to reach out beyond the body wall. Extended phenotypes are things like birds’ nests, or bower-bird bowers. A peacock has a tail with which it woos females. A male bower bird builds a grass tail, a bower, in the bushes, and dances around it, and that’s what attracts the females. That bower made of grass is performing exactly the same role as a peacock’s tail. Genes that make for a good bower, a pretty bower, get passed on to the next generation. The bower is a phenotypic effect of genes. It’s an extended phenotype.

There are genes for bowers of different shapes. A caddis worm builds a house made of stones. Some might build a house made of sticks, others might build one of dead leaves. This is undoubtedly a Darwinian adaptation. Therefore there must be genes for stone shape, stone color, all the properties of the house; to the extent that they’re Darwinian adaptations, they must be genetic effects. These are just examples to illustrate the point that the cascade of causal arrows leading from genes to phenotypes doesn’t have to stop at the body wall. It goes beyond the body wall until it hits things like stones, grass.

The extended phenotype is completely logical. It means that anything out there in the world could be a phenotypic effect of my genes. In practice, most of them aren’t, but there’s no reason in principle why they shouldn’t be. Something like a beaver dam causes a flood, which creates a lake, which is to the benefit of the beaver. That lake is an adaptation for the beaver. It’s an extended phenotype. There are genes for big lakes, deep lakes: lake phenotypes have genetic causes. You can build up to a vision of causal arrows leading from genes and reaching out and affecting the world at large

Tiré du chapitre 3:  Richard Dawkins A survival machine