“Scaffolded Reproducers, Scaffolded Agents” by Mateusz Bagiński

[Experimenting with transposing a concept coined in one domain to another domain, perhaps not completely legibly to the entire intended audience.]

In Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith introduces a bunch of useful concepts allowing us to think more clearly about evolution and its constitutive processes. One of those is the distinction between three types of reproducers: collective, simple, and scaffolded (introduced in chapter 5.1). The short explanation of those categories is as follows.

• Simple reproducers are entities capable of self-sufficient reproduction that are not composed of entities that themselves are self-sufficient reproducers.
• • The paradigmatic example is a bacterium. Eukaryotic cells are less paradigmatic examples because it involves mitochondria, which themselves are in-betweenish cases between simple and scaffolded.
• Collective reproducers are entities capable of self-sufficient reproduction that are composed of entities that themselves are self-sufficient reproducers (simple or collective).
• • The paradigmatic example is a multicellular organism (insofar as we take the individual eukaryotic cells to be simple reproducers, see the point above).
• Scaffolded reproducers are entities that reproduce only by relying on the reproductive machinery that is not "their own".
• • Paradigmatic examples are genes and viruses (central Dawkinsian replicators). Less paradigmatic [...]

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 26th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xDfcLHzdA9tbK6k6X/scaffolded-reproducers-scaffolded-agents

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.