Scaffolded Reproducers, Scaffolded Agents

# Scaffolded Reproducers, Scaffolded Agents
By Mateusz Bagiński
Published: 2026-03-26
*\[Experimenting with transposing a concept coined in one domain to another domain, perhaps not completely legibly to the entire intended audience.\]*

In [*Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection*](https://academic.oup.com/book/4808), [Peter Godfrey-Smith](https://petergodfreysmith.com/) 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 examples include mitochondria and plastids,[^bt0npezhu1] as well as memes.

As is clear from the bullet sub-points, the categories are not clear,[^smycb7jy9g] but they do give some interesting anchor points to think about varieties of reproduction.

* * *

What if we try to apply those concepts to agency? How well do they carry over?

The LessWrong sphere has a long history of interest in collective agency, e.g., [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xud7Mti9jS4tbWqQE/hierarchical-agency-a-missing-piece-in-ai-alignment), [here](https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-cosmopolitan-leviathan-enthymeme.html), and [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/sequences/ZbmRyDN8TCpBTZSip) (see also the [subagents tag](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/subagents)). Unless we assume some weirdly exotic metaphysics or a non-standard notion of subagent,[^2exc9rv7zr] it cannot be subagents all the way down. So, recursing on the constitutive structure of a collective agent, we will at some point arrive at a "simple agent",[^w1k21n2ejcb] whatever that means.

That's collective and simple agency. As far as I can tell, the main context where something like "scaffolded agency" is discussed is LLM scaffolding: you use a language model as a "cognitive engine" powering a so-called AI agent, which, in turn, is supposed to do something, and use the power of this cognitive en

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