[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.

“Scaffolded Reproducers, Scaffolded Agents” by Mateusz Bagiński

LessWrong (30+ Karma)