Niche construction

Examples of niche construction include the building of nests and burrows by animals, the creation of shade, the influencing of wind speed, and alternations to nutrient cycling by plants.

The effect of niche construction is especially pronounced in situations where environmental alterations persist for several generations, introducing the evolutionary role of ecological inheritance.

[1] Niche construction theory (NCT) has been anticipated by diverse people in the past, including by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his What Is Life?

He drew his attention to the many ways in which animals modify their selective environments throughout their lives, by choosing and changing their environmental conditions, a phenomenon that he termed "the exploitive system".

[15] Over the next decade research into niche construction increased rapidly, with a rush of experimental and theoretical studies across a broad range of fields.

[28] Its impact is probably because it is immediately apparent that humans possess an unusually potent capability to regulate, construct and destroy their environments, and that this is generating some pressing current problems (e.g. climate change, deforestation, urbanization).

Mathematical models have established that cultural niche construction can modify natural selection on human genes and drive evolutionary events.

[29] Humans have modified selection, for instance, by dispersing into new environments with different climatic regimes, devising agricultural practices or domesticating livestock.

A well-researched example is the finding that dairy farming created the selection pressure that led to the spread of alleles for adult lactase persistence.

For instance, Derek Bickerton describes how our ancestors constructed scavenging niches that required them to communicate in order to recruit sufficient individuals to drive off predators away from megafauna corpses.

[33] Laubichler and Renn[32] argue that niche construction theory offers the prospect of a broader synthesis of evolutionary phenomena through "the notion of expanded and multiple inheritance systems (from genomic to ecological, social and cultural).

[35] They wrote: "NCT argues that niche construction is a distinct evolutionary process, potentially of equal importance to natural selection.

Although the advocate agrees that there is a useful distinction to be made between processes that modify gene frequencies directly, and factors that play different roles in evolution...