Scale-free Niche Construction: expanding agent-microenvironment co-development to unconventional substrates

Abstract

Niche construction emphasizes the active aspect of life forms that alter their environment via feedback loops in which that environment inevitably changes their behavior, structure, and future evolution. We argue that this powerful dynamic is general, extending far beyond typical applications in ecology and evolutionary biology. We explain how niche construction extends the scope of classical predictive and control loops beyond the nervous system and organism-level. Examples from cognitive science, psychopathology, cell and developmental biology, cancer biology, robotics, and AI illustrate how agents use living and non-living aspects of their microenvironment as a scratchpad, allowing active long-term memory that supports cohesion of agency over time. Niche construction enables "offloading" to the environment (externalizing) various cognitive operations, including planning, problem solving, and social coordination. We also discuss niche construction an example of the plasticity of the machine/data mapping, enabling analysis of systems from the perspective of the patterns within excitable media (agential data). Finally, we show wetlab data for a new kind of niche construction: active stigmergy, in which cells leave dynamic, bioelectrically-active components in the microenvironment. By recognizing niche construction in novel spaces, important invariants across disciplines can drive advances in biomedicine, engineering, and AI.