This is a very interesting article, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. The quote +John Kellden cites below is worth reading, but I'm not sure what "Kantian wholes" Kaufmann is referring to. Is he talking about selves? Is this an explicitly panpsychist position hidden behind a veil of holism? Not that I'd object…

The quote I'll pick is below. "Life keeps making room for itself!" I'll just note that this is true of the niches humans create too, of course. Not just our economies in the financial sense meant in this article, but for the literal environments that our bodies and its supporting infrastructure creates.

And not the biological niches either, the ones filled by raccoon and your pet cat, or the bacteria in your gut. We create, along with these biological cohabitants, any number of technological devices, objects, highly industrially designed to play any number of niche roles in ones daily life. These objects, which are as (and usually more) resource-intensive as any living creature, is also part of the life we continue to make room for.

The very part of us that makes us human is the part of us that is making ourselves digital.

"This niche creation via the expanding Adjacent Possible expands Darwin's wedge filled floor with ever more wedges! Life keeps making more room for itself! Competition tempers this expansion.

More, I think that, on average, each new species, alone or with others, creates more than one new empty Adjacent Possible niche, generating a self amplifying, "supracritical" explosion of ever new species occupying the ever new niches they create without selection. The biopshere explodes in interwoven diversity. This explosion process is interrupted by small and large extinction events."

John Kellden originally shared this post:

Insights, part 26: Beyond Adjacent Possible

"…new niches do not cause, but enable…"

The World, Horatio, Is Richer Than All Our Dreams
"Kantian wholes literally make their worlds together, providing functionalities for one another in the very expanding Adjacent Possible "floor" where they keep creating rooms for themselves. Then evolution is not just Natural Selection and the winnowing of less fit forms in the struggle for survival, it is also just this co-creation of niches without Natural Selection and adaptation to them by Natural Selection. Moreover, selection acts on quantum acausal mutations that are heritable variation. Then the new niches do not cause, but enable the bursting growth of the biosphere."
— Stuart Kauffman

via +John Verdon
https://plus.google.com/u/0/107400768680112451370/posts/7bewNDuq9JS

Beyond Darwin: Niche Creation And Creative Evolution : NPR

How does Darwin explain the swim bladder?