Co-evolution, as treated across the depth-psychology and cognitive-science corpus assembled in Seba, names a mutual, bidirectional process by which organisms and their environments — or, by extension, mind and world, culture and biology, self and other — constitute one another through sustained structural coupling rather than through a one-way impress of environment upon passive organism. The concept carries weight precisely where classical adaptationist accounts prove insufficient: it insists that neither pole of any evolving dyad pre-exists the relationship unchanged. Thompson, drawing on Maturana and Varela, makes this explicit in the enactive framework, where organism–environment co-determination displaces optimisation as the central evolutionary logic. Developmental Systems Theory, as Thompson presents it, extends the argument so that natural selection itself is reconceived as the outcome of differentially propagating developmental systems in which organism and environment ‘define and select each other.’ Damasio’s invocation of Durham’s work on genes, culture, and human diversity opens a complementary register: co-evolution operates not only between species and habitat but between biological imperatives and cultural formations. Hogenson situates the Baldwin Effect within this constellation, showing how learned behaviour can feed back into genomic change over evolutionary time — a dynamic relevant to Jung’s own thinking about the archetype. The term therefore bridges biology, phenomenology, and depth psychology, serving as a hinge concept wherever the corpus interrogates received nature-nurture dualisms.
Like two partners in a dance who bring forth each other’s movements, organism and environment enact each other through their structural coupling.
Thompson articulates the enactive core of co-evolution: organism and environment are mutually constitutive through structural coupling, displacing adaptationist accounts of one-way environmental design.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Natural selection is not an independent, external agent or force acting on organisms, but rather the outcome of the differential propagation of developmental systems: ‘It is the net result of many other interactions in which organism and environment define and select each other.’
Drawing on Oyama’s Developmental Systems Theory, Thompson reframes natural selection as a co-evolutionary outcome rather than an external cause, collapsing the inside-outside distinction.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Both theories express dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis: a sometimes narrow, gene-centered focus, the resulting neglect of active, developing organisms, and the notion of adaptation as the solving of pre-existing environmental problems.
Thompson links autopoiesis theory and Developmental Systems Theory as converging critiques of neo-Darwinism, each presupposing a co-evolutionary logic in which organisms are active participants rather than passive targets of selection.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
See also William H. Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human Diversity (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), as an example of the compatibility of biology and cultural processes.
Damasio explicitly cites Durham’s gene-culture co-evolution framework to support the claim that biological and cultural processes are mutually constraining rather than hierarchically ordered.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Deacon points out, the most fundamental elements of language, insofar as they are actual aspects of the environment and not linguistic abstractions, do not meet this criterion, and it is therefore impossible for evolution to assimilate fundamental syntactic structures as traits coded in the genome.
Hogenson, via Deacon, argues that language and brain co-evolved without syntactic structures being directly inscribed in the genome, illustrating the Baldwin Effect as a co-evolutionary mechanism central to Jungian evolutionary thinking.
, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001supporting
Because the environment is never static but always changing, natural selection will inevitably lag behind environmental change.
Thompson’s exposition of adaptationism’s internal limits sets up the necessity of co-evolutionary models in which both organism and environment are perpetually in motion relative to each other.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Natural selection, rather than competing with chance and self-organization, is part of a complex process that involves all three elements, and is itself a phenomenon that has evolved out of the play of the others.
Thompson presents natural selection as emergent from the interplay of self-organization and contingency, supporting a process view of evolution in which co-evolutionary dynamics are irreducible to selection alone.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
The successful option was shaped by the imperative requirements of homeostasis, and that was not magic, except in a poetic sense. It consisted of concrete physical and chemical constraints applied to the life process, within the cells, in the context of their physicochemical relations with the environment.
Damasio’s account of bacterial symbiosis illustrates proto-co-evolutionary logic at the cellular level, where homeostatic imperatives drive mutual accommodation between formerly competing entities.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
The activity of the organism, including self-stimulation, is often a crucial aspect of species-typical development, and so are influences from other organisms.
Developmental Systems Theory as presented by Thompson foregrounds organism activity — including inter-organismic influence — as constitutive of species-typical traits, embedding co-evolutionary reciprocity within ontogeny itself.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Wilson and Sober extended Darwin’s general ideas on this topic into a ‘multilevel selection theory’ and cited evidence from biology as well as anthropology that human beings are adapted by evolution to live in communal and egalitarian communities.
Alexander’s account of multilevel selection theory implies co-evolutionary pressures across individual and group levels, challenging purely individualist interpretations of fitness.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
The problem of the origin of life is to… explain not simply the fact of evolution… but also the widespread appearance of design in nature.
Thompson’s discussion of the bootstrapping problem at the origin of life contextualises co-evolutionary dynamics against the deeper question of how selection itself could have emerged from pre-biological self-organisation.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside
Living organisms integrate their cellular communities by mingling their bodies and sharing their genes. In this way they can acquire learnt experiences from other organisms.
McGilchrist highlights horizontal gene transfer and experiential inheritance as mechanisms that blur species boundaries and support a co-evolutionary rather than strictly vertical model of biological change.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
The ‘pageant’ of evolution is a staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable.
Gould’s contingency argument, cited by Thompson, qualifies co-evolutionary narratives by insisting that the specific trajectories of mutual adaptation are radically contingent rather than necessary.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside