Ecological inheritance

Standard evolutionary theory focuses on the influence that natural selection and genetic inheritance has on biological evolution, when individuals that survive and reproduce also transmit genes to their offspring.

[7][4] Organisms in subsequent generations will encounter ecological inheritance because they are affected by a new selective environment created by prior niche construction.

"[8] Ecological inheritance has also been defined as, "... the accumulation of environmental changes, such as altered soil, atmosphere or ocean states that previous generations have brought about through their niche-constructing activity, and that influence the development of descendant organisms.

[10]  For example, a feature of the environment may have increased the fitness of an individual by enabling it to acquire a food resource or evade a predator more efficiently.

[4][10] Ecological inheritance occurs when an organism experiences an altered factor-feature relationship with selected pressures originating from parents or ancestral generations.

In the book, On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin described ways that organisms alter selection pressures by modifying local environments (i.e., habitats in which they live) that affect their fitness.

[12] For example, the effect of ecological inheritance on long-term evolutionary dynamics are performed by subsequent generations of earthworm that burrow through soil.

[7] The burrowing makes water easily available and absorbed by earthworms in the soil, and consequently, worms have kept their ancestral freshwater kidneys rather than evolve terrestrial anatomy.

[7] Ecological inheritance can also involve the chemicals produced by organisms of different species such as the sea urchin Holopneustes purpurascens and the red alga Delisea pulchra.