Creatures of Their Own Making: Niche Co-Construction in the Divine Sustaining
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From biology to anthropology, Niche Construction Theory (NCT) offers a corrective to accounts that neglect or diminish the agency of organisms in evolutionary process. This article engages with key features of NCT to reenvision theological accounts of human work: that ecosystems are superconstructions of several organisms, that niche construction also involves destruction, and that ecological inheritance ought to be considered alongside genetic transmission. I also address concerns over the tendency of NCT to highlight the constructive ultimacy of humans during an ecological crisis. Drawing on modern Protestant theology, I situate creatures’ agency within a fuller account of God’s providence, re-embedding claims about divine–human concurrence within the divine sustaining. I therefore argue for a shift away from seeing humans as co-creators with God in order to better understand ourselves as niche co-constructors, alongside our neighboring species, in a manner that ensures life can go on.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it