Niche construction
Organisms actively modify environments, shaping their own evolution.
Niche construction is the ecological process by which an organism alters its own (or another species') local environment. These alterations can be a physical change to the organism's environment, or they can encompass the active movement of an organism from one habitat to another where it then experiences different environmental pressures. Examples include the building of nests and burrows, creation of shade, influencing wind speed, and alterations to nutrient cycling by plants. Although often directly beneficial, modifications are not necessarily always so; for instance, when organisms dump detritus, they can degrade their own local environments. Within some biological evolutionary frameworks, niche construction can actively beget processes pertaining to ecological inheritance, whereby the organism constructs new or unique ecological, and perhaps even sociological, environmental realities characterized by specific selective pressures.
- field
- Evolutionary biology, ecology
- known_for
- Concept that organisms modify their own environments, influencing natural selection and evolution
- key_early_advocate
- Conrad Waddington (the exploitive system)
- prominent_writer
- Richard Lewontin (1970s–1980s)
Lore & Background
The niche construction perspective was brought to prominence through the writings of Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lewontin wrote a series of articles on adaptation, pointing out that organisms do not passively adapt through selection to pre-existing conditions, but actively construct important components of their niches. Earlier, developmental biologist Conrad Waddington had drawn attention to the many ways animals modify their selective environments throughout their lives, a phenomenon he termed 'the exploitive system'.
Reader's Guide
Over the next decade, research into niche construction increased rapidly, with a rush of experimental and theoretical studies across a broad range of fields. Mathematical evolutionary theory suggests niche construction can fix genes or phenotypes that would otherwise be deleterious, create or eliminate equilibria, affect evolutionary rates, cause time lags, generate momentum, inertia, autocatalytic effects, catastrophic responses to selection, and cyclical dynamics. It can also drive niche-constructing traits to fixation, facilitate the evolution of cooperation, regulate environmental states, allow persistence in inhospitable conditions, facilitate range expansion, affect carrying capacities, drive coevolutionary events, exacerbate and ameliorate competition, affect the likelihood of coexistence, and produce macroevolutionary trends. Niche construction theory has had a particular impact in the human sciences, including biological anthropology, archaeology, and psychology, and is recognized to have played important roles in human evolution, including the evolution of cognitive capabilities.
Did You Know?
- Earthworms physically and chemically modify soil, allowing these primarily aquatic organisms to live on land, as originally pointed out by Darwin.
- Lemon ants use formic acid as a herbicide to eliminate unsuitable trees, producing distinctive habitats known as Devil's gardens.
- Beavers build dams that create lakes, altering nutrient cycling, decomposition dynamics, and plant community composition.
- Cyanobacteria produced oxygen as a waste product of photosynthesis, dramatically changing Earth's atmosphere and oceans.
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