Creatures of Their Own Making: Niche Co-Construction in the Divine Sustaining
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.084 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".