Niche Construction

by Schaaf, Larry J.

• ISBN13: 9780691044385
• ISBN10: 0691044384
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-07-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

The seemingly innocent observation that the activities of organisms bring about changes in environments is so obvious that it seems an unlikely focus for a new line of thinking about evolution. Yet niche construction--as this process of organism-driven environmental modification is known--has hidden complexities. By transforming biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection in external environments, niche construction generates feedback in evolution on a scale hitherto underestimated--and in a manner that transforms the evolutionary dynamic. It also plays a critical role in ecology, supporting ecosystem engineering and influencing the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Despite this, niche construction has been given short shrift in theoretical biology, in part because it cannot be fully understood within the framework of standard evolutionary theory. Wedding evolution and ecology, this book extends evolutionary theory by formally including niche construction and ecological inheritance as additional evolutionary processes. The authors support their historic move with empirical data, theoretical population genetics, and conceptual models. They also describe new research methods capable of testing the theory. They demonstrate how their theory can resolve long-standing problems in ecology, particularly by advancing the sorely needed synthesis of ecology and evolution, and how it offers an evolutionary basis for the human sciences. Already hailed as a pioneering work by some of the world's most influential biologists, this is a rare, potentially field-changing contribution to the biological sciences.

Author Biography

F. John Odling-Smee is a Lecturer in Oxford University's Institute of Biological Anthropology Kevin N. Laland is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader in Biology at the University of St. Andrews Marcus W. Feldman is Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. vii
List of Tables	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
The Evidence for Niche Construction	p. 36
A Theoretical Investigation of the Evolutionary Consequences of Niche Construction	p. 116
General Qualitative Characteristics of Niche Construction	p. 167
Niche Construction and Ecology	p. 194
Human Niche Construction, Learning, and Cultural Processes	p. 239
Testing Niche Construction 1: Empirical Methods and Predictions for Evolutionary Biology	p. 282
Testing Niche Construction 2: Empirical Methods, Theory, and Predictions for Ecology	p. 305
Testing Niche Construction 3: Empirical Methods and Predictions for the Human Sciences	p. 337
Extended Evolutionary Theory	p. 370
Model 1a	p. 387
Model 1b	p. 404
Model 2	p. 408
Models 3 and 4	p. 411
Model 5	p. 415
Glossary of New Terms	p. 419
Bibliography (indexed)	p. 421
Index	p. 457
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.