Niche construction, innovation and complexity

Laland, Kevin N.; Boogert, Neeltje J.; Evans, Cara L.

doi:10.1016/j.eist.2013.08.003

Cited by 54 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 93 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…[156]). However, niche construction is not limited to the extra-organismal environmentit can involve the organism's phenotype itself, through for example, 'phenotypic accommodation' [156,157]. Arguably, the main distinction between the (classic conception of ) the organism and its environment is that the former is an autonomous, reproducing entity.…”

Section: (D) Interacting With Constructing and Destructing The Envirmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies

Hochberg

Marquet

Boyd

et al. 2017

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Innovations are generally unexpected, often spectacular changes in phenotypes and ecological functions. The contributions to this theme issue are the latest conceptual, theoretical and experimental developments, addressing how ecology, environment, ontogeny and evolution are central to understanding the complexity of the processes underlying innovations. Here, we set the stage by introducing and defining key terms relating to innovation and discuss their relevance to biological, cultural and technological change. Discovering how the generation and transmission of novel biological information, environmental interactions and selective evolutionary processes contribute to innovation as an ecosystem will shed light on how the dominant features across life come to be, generalize to social, cultural and technological evolution, and have applications in the health sciences and sustainability. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies’.

show abstract

Section: (D) Interacting With Constructing and Destructing The Envirmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Niche construction is a powerful conduit of adaptation and innovation (e.g. [156]). However, niche construction is not limited to the extra-organismal environmentit can involve the organism's phenotype itself, through for example, 'phenotypic accommodation' [156,157].…”

Section: (D) Interacting With Constructing and Destructing The Envirmentioning

confidence: 99%

Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies

Hochberg

Marquet

Boyd

et al. 2017

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Humans exhibit an extraordinary niche construction capacity that “stems from the capacity for rapid rates of change through cultural transmission”. (Laland et al 2014, p. 436) Environmental problems such as soil degradation, water pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss can be considered as a legacy of previous alterations of selective forces, which affected the control webs that underlie ecosystems. As Laland et al put it, causality flows through the ecosystem, from cultural to genetic and back to cultural processes, and from one species to the next, driven by iterative bouts of niche construction and selection at multiple levels (Laland et al 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This narrative has two central facets: One is the structuring effect of the landscape and material artefacts on social life and, thus, on human history, and the other one is the notion that all physical interactions between people and their environment are based on opinioned perceptions. Narrated as socio-ecological niche construction, the Alpine village Damüls appears as a dynamic selective environment for the inhabitants, which is structured by the social complex as much as it structures social complexity (Laland et al 2014). Each generation has to deal with the ecological inheritance of its ancestors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Commodifying snow, taming the waters. Socio-ecological niche construction in an Alpine village

Groß¹,

Winiwarter²

2015

Water Hist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

White belts of snow clad mountains all over the world each winter. Even if there is no snow, the tourism industry is able to produce the white finery at the push of the button, thereby consuming large amounts of water. Studying Damüls, a well-known ski resort in Austria’s westernmost province Vorarlberg, we can show that the development of a service sector within agro-pastoral landscapes was connected with novel water uses and massive interventions into Alpine landscapes. Human niche construction theory offers a unique avenue for studying the development of Alpine communities, but also highlights side effects accompanying the change from agrarian to tourism livelihoods. One aim of this paper is to broaden the scope of human niche construction theory. Inceptive, counteractive and relocational niche construction activities were coupled to the differentiation of actor groups. To incorporate social dynamics, indispensable for studies in environmental history, we propose the concept of socio-ecological niche construction. The paper investigates how villagers balanced resource limitations typical for an agrarian society with the differentiation of sub-niches, mediating selective forces on the population. When the valleys were industrialized, Damüls was almost given up as a permanent settlement. Then, tourists entered the stage, by and by turning the wheel of local development into a different direction. A tourism niche based on natural snow evolved from the 1930s onwards. While the socio-ecological niches of agriculture and tourism coexisted in the interwar years, this changed when ski lifts were built, embedded into a debt-based economy that made the tourism niche vulnerable to snow availability. Snow-dependency became a powerful selective force. It was mediated by the ski lift companies through a range of niche construction activities that turned water into an important resource of snowmaking systems.

show abstract

“…In recent decades, the phenomenon of niche construction (henceforth, NC) (Odling-Smee 1988) 56 has been receiving a lot of attention in the evolutionary biology literature, with many arguments 57 that a full consideration of this phenomenon as an evolutionary mechanism is a critical and 58 consequential aspect of a new, extended, evolutionary synthesis (Laland 2015;Laland et al 59 2015). It has been suggested that an NC perspective goes beyond the standard thinking in 60 evolutionary biology in significant ways, and that an incorporation of an NC perspective 61 necessitates a major overhaul of how we think about the evolutionary process, especially the role 62 of natural selection in promoting the evolution of adaptations (Laland 2015;Laland et al 2014aLaland et al , 63 b, 2015. Just to cite a few representative examples from the last four years alone, it has been 64 claimed that: 65 6 construction on metapopulation dynamics (Hui et al 2004;Han et al 2009;Zhang et al 2012), 124 and multi-strain or multi-species population dynamics (Krakauer et al 2009).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Niche construction in evolutionary theory: the construction of an academic niche?

Gupta

Prasad

Dey

et al. 2017

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/109793 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online 2 Abstract 31In recent years, fairly far-reaching claims have been repeatedly made about how niche 32 construction, the modification by organisms of their environment, and that of other organisms, 33 represents a vastly neglected phenomenon in ecological and evolutionary thought. The 34 proponents of this view claim that the niche construction perspective greatly expands the scope 35 of standard evolutionary theory and that niche construction deserves to be treated as a significant 36 evolutionary process in its own right, almost at par with natural selection. Claims have also been 37 advanced about how niche construction theory represents a substantial extension to, and re-38 orientation of, standard evolutionary theory, which is criticized as being narrowly gene-centric 39 and ignoring the rich complexity and reciprocity of organism-environment interactions. We 40 examine these claims in some detail and show that they do not stand up to scrutiny. We suggest 41 that the manner in which niche construction theory is sought to be pushed in the literature is 42 better viewed as an exercise in academic niche construction whereby, through incessant 43 repetition of largely untenable claims, and the deployment of rhetorically appealing but logically 44 dubious analogies, a receptive climate for a certain sub-discipline is sought to be manufactured 45 within the scientific community. We see this as an unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable, nascent 46 post-truth tendency within science.

show abstract

Niche construction, innovation and complexity

Cited by 54 publications

References 93 publications

Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies

Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies

Commodifying snow, taming the waters. Socio-ecological niche construction in an Alpine village

Niche construction in evolutionary theory: the construction of an academic niche?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About