... for scientific understanding in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using the concept of affordances, as initially described in the 1970s by James Jerome Gibson, and subsequentially amended by anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists, as well as material culture or design historians, I...

... of this oyster and linked these properties to its ability to clean the estuary. The discovery of the filtration properties of the oyster was an affordance that enabled the oyster to “partner” with governmental agencies and NGOs who were attempting to restore the bay’s clean water, fish, and birdlife. Third...