Modeling Scaffolded Development into the Adjacent Possible Environment

Abstract I characterize a role for “environments” as ecological scaffolding of organism development in the evolution of novelty. I interpret Rainey’s bacterial experimental system for empirically modeling evolutionary transition to multicellularity as an ecological-developmental problem in terms of a formal model of Kauffman’s concept of evolution into the “adjacent possible.” I propose a scenario to interpret scaffolds dynamically, treating them as organisms modeled in the same way as the developing systems they scaffold, rather than as fixed constraint boundary conditions. The scenario suggests avenues for mathematically modeling scaffolding dynamics.