Niche construction and the role of environment : towards a new logic of natural selection explanations

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lynn Chiu
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Complex Traits ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Environmental Pressures ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Individual

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Biological systems may move in, feed on, socialize with, and change the world around it. How should we explain how these systems develop, act, think, and evolve? Internalists and externalists urge us to look past the entangled complexities and seek the drivers of life internally (such as genes or the brain, etc.) or externally (in the developmental, informational, social, etc. environment). Of course, everyone is an interactionist in a minimal sense, given that no system is entirely externally controlled or completely self sufficient, but sophisticated internalists and externalists think it fruitful to make intelligent bets about where to look first and how to prioritize the internal and external causes. The focus of this dissertation is externalism in evolutionary biology. Elsewhere in biology and psychology, mounting evidence that organisms maintain life activities through feedback loops with the environment have motivated theories to expand the notion of "organism" or incorporate environment as scaffolds. However, in light of all this change, the theory of natural selection has managed to stay stubbornly externalist. What I study and critique in this dissertation is the firmly held presupposition that natural selection is an environmentally driven phenomena, an assumption that drives research to almost always seek natural selection explanations of complex, plastic, and constructing systems in terms of some complex, fluctuating, challenge in the environment. It doesn't have to be. I lay down the steps that lead towards a new logic of natural selection, a form of evolution that is not necessarily driven by the environment. The first step is to figure out whether and how explanations by natural selection are externalist. Fitness, the core concept of natural selection explanations, is about how good a trait is in dealing with environmental pressures (Chapter 1). Natural selection is seen as an optimizing process that fits organisms to environment; its presence detected from correlations between organism and environment (Chapter 2). Applications of evolutionary theory outside of biology, for instance, in entrepreneurship and organization studies, export what they think are the core, defining features of natural selection, and to them, it explicitly includes an environment that is the locus of control (Chapter 3). The second step is to figure out what it takes to budge this strong externalist stance towards natural selection. Behavior, the ability of organisms to interact with their environments, is a common dividing factor in evolutionary internalist versus externalist debates. The internalist Lamarckian position postulates an "internal will" that drives organism evolution and development toward greater complexity, with the idiosyncratic use-and-disuse of the will resulting in diversity between species. The externalist Darwinian program, at its most extreme, holds that all features of the organism, including behavior, are merely passively selected for by the environment. Post-Darwin, the internalist position questions how powerful and important natural selection is for the evolution of complex traits. The anti-externalists move? To show that internal and interacting causes weaken the power of natural selection, as if natural selection explanations are always externalist. Behaviors stand at the intersection of organism and environment, and thus have been used to adjudicate internalist/externalist positions. I will thus focus on one type of behavior--niche construction: the ability of organisms to change their experienced environments--to question the staunching externalism of natural selection explanations. The last step is to move towards a different move against externalism by incorporating niche construction into natural selection, as a condition of natural selection instead of the latter's product or antagonizing force. I analyze what happens to the notion of fitness when organisms differ in fitness because of their abilities and the individual environments that are constructed, mingled, and responded to (Chapter 1). I examine theories of niche construction (Niche Construction Theory, pioneered by Kevin Laland, John Odling-Smee, and others, Dialectical Biology, by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, and Denis Walsh's Situated Adaptationism) to drive a distinction between niche construction as constitutive versus alternative to natural selection (Chapter 2). This last step sets the motivation and foundations for a new theory of natural selection and fitness.

Units and levels of selection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samir Okasha
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Kin Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Levels Of Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Transitions ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
The Individual

In a standard Darwinian explanation, natural selection takes place at the level of the individual organism, i.e. some organisms enjoy a survival or reproduction advantage over others, which results in evolutionary change. In principle however, natural selection could operate at other hierarchical levels too, above and below that of the organism, for example the level of genes, cells, groups, colonies or even whole species. This possibility gives rise to the ‘levels of selection’ question in evolutionary biology. Group and colony-level selection have been proposed, originally by Darwin, as a means by which altruism can evolve. (In biology, ‘altruism’ refers to behaviour which entails a fitness cost to the individual so behaving, but benefits others.) Though this idea is still alive today, many theorists regard kin selection as a superior explanation for the existence of altruism. Kin selection arises from the fact that relatives share genes, so if an organism behaves altruistically towards its relatives, there is a greater than random chance that the beneficiary of the altruistic action will itself be an altruist. Kin selection is closely bound up with the ‘gene’s eye view’ of evolution, which holds that genes, not organisms, are the true beneficiaries of the evolutionary process. The gene’s eye approach to evolution, though heuristically valuable, does not in itself resolve the levels of selection question, because selection processes that occur at many hierarchical levels can all be seen from a gene’s eye viewpoint. In recent years, the levels of selection discussion has been re-invigorated, and subtly transformed, by the important new work on the ‘major evolutionary transitions’. These transitions occur when a number of free-living biological units, originally capable of surviving and reproducing alone, become integrated into a larger whole, giving rise to a new biological unit at a higher level of organization. Evolutionary transitions are intimately bound up with the levels of selection issue, because during a transition the potential exists for selection to operate simultaneously at two different hierarchical levels.

scholarly journals Natural selections on both amino acid sequences and expression levels are determinants of ohnolog retention

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lin Miao ◽  
Miaoxin Li
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Amino Acid ◽  
Complex Traits ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Amino Acid Sequences ◽  
Regulatory Sequences ◽  
Unified Framework ◽  
Retention Model ◽  
Coding Sequences ◽  
Expression Levels

AbstractThe mechanism of ohnolog retention is a subject of concern in evolutionary biology. Natural selections on coding sequences and gene dosages have been proposed to be determinants of ohnolog retention. However, the relationship between the two models is not widely accepted, and the role of regulatory sequences on ohnolog retention has long been neglected. In this study, based on a model of complex traits’ genetic architecture, we compared the natural selection’s strength on corresponding sequences between ohnologs and non-ohnologs by comparing complex traits’ heritability enrichments. We showed that complex traits’ regulatory sequences’ heritability enrichments (p = 1.1 × 10−5 in 5 kb flanking regions) and expression-mediated heritability enrichments (p = 2.1 × 10−5) of ohnologs were significantly higher than non-ohnologs. Then, we deduced that regulatory sequences of ohnologs were under substantial natural selection, which was also a determent of ohnolog retention. Meanwhile, we showed that in coding sequences, the complex traits’ heritability enrichments of ohnologs were significantly higher than of non-ohnologs (p = 9.9 × 10−5), supporting the ohnolog retention model of natural selection on coding sequences. We also showed that complex traits’ causal gene expression effect sizes of ohnologs were significantly larger than of non-ohnologs (p = 8.8 × 10−6), supporting the ohnolog retention model of natural selection on gene dosages. In conclusion, we provide the first unified framework to show that both amino acid sequences and expression levels of ohnologs are under substantial selection, which may end the long-standing debate on ohnolog retention models.

scholarly journals Coordination in theory extension: how Reichenbach can help us understand endogenization in evolutionary biology

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Luchetti
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Mathematical Representations ◽  
Selection Theory ◽  
Semantic Extension ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Functional Extension ◽  
The Right ◽  
Natural Selection Theory

AbstractReichenbach’s early solution to the scientific problem of how abstract mathematical representations can successfully express real phenomena is rooted in his view of coordination. In this paper, I claim that a Reichenbach-inspired, ‘layered’ view of coordination provides us with an effective tool to systematically analyse some epistemic and conceptual intricacies resulting from a widespread theorising strategy in evolutionary biology, recently discussed by Okasha (2018) as ‘endogenization’. First, I argue that endogenization is a form of extension of natural selection theory that comprises three stages: quasi-axiomatisation, functional extension, and semantic extension. Then, I argue that the functional extension of one core principle of natural selection theory, namely, the principle of heritability, requires the semantic extension of the concept of inheritance. This is because the semantic extension of ‘inheritance’ is necessary to establish a novel form of coordination between the principle of heritability and the extended domain of phenomena that it is supposed to represent. Finally, I suggest that—despite the current lack of consensus on the right semantic extension of ‘inheritance’—we can fruitfully understand the reconceptualization of ‘inheritance’ provided by niche construction theorists as the result of a novel form of coordination.

Niche Construction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Laland
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
The Body ◽  
Biological Anthropology ◽  
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Selection Pressures ◽  
Niche Construction Theory ◽  
Ecological Inheritance

Niche construction is the process whereby organisms, through their activities and choices, modify their own and each other’s niches. Examples of niche construction include the building of nests, burrows, and mounds and alternation of physical and chemical conditions by animals, and the creation of shade, influencing of wind speed, and alternation of nutrient cycling by plants. Here the “niche” is construed as the set of natural selection pressures to which the population is exposed (discussed in Ecology). By transforming natural selection pressures, niche construction generates feedback in evolution, on a scale hitherto underestimated and in a manner that alters the evolutionary dynamic. Niche construction also plays a critical role in ecology, in which it supports ecosystem engineering and eco-evolutionary feedbacks and, in part, regulates the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Niche construction theory is the body of formal (e.g., population genetic, population ecology) mathematical theory that explores niche construction’s evolutionary and ecological ramifications. Many organisms construct developmental environments for their offspring or modify environmental states for other descendants, a process known as “ecological inheritance.” In recent years, this ecological inheritance has been widely recognized as a core component of extra-genetic inheritance, and it is central to attempts within evolutionary biology to broaden the concept of heredity beyond transmission genetics. The development of many organisms—and the recurrence of traits across generations—has been found to depend critically on the construction of developmental environments by ancestors. Historically, the study of niche construction has been contentious because theoretical and empirical findings from niche construction theory appear to challenge some orthodox accounts of evolution. Many researchers studying niche construction embrace an alternative perspective in which niche construction is regarded as a fundamental evolutionary process in its own right, as well as a major source of adaptation. This perspective is aligned intellectually with other progressive movements within evolutionary biology that are calling for an extended evolutionary synthesis. In addition to ecology and evolution, niche construction theory has had an impact on a variety of disciplines, including archaeology, biological anthropology, conservation biology, developmental biology, earth sciences, and philosophy of biology.

Niche Construction

Anthropology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Population Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Ecological Niches ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Original Writings ◽  
Multispecies Ethnography ◽  
Evolutionary Narratives

Niche construction is a concept that originated in evolutionary biology. It challenges the assumption that ecological niches are empty, pre-existing environmental spaces into which passive organisms must be fitted through adaptive natural selection. Niche construction theory argues that organisms construct their own niches when they actively select features of their current environment on which to rely, thereby influencing the selection pressures they encounter. Niche construction was developed after 1975, during a period when sociobiology had gained popularity among evolutionary theorists, with claims that all features of organisms, from anatomy to social behavior, could be explained in terms of natural selection on genes. Organisms, indeed, were disappearing as agents in evolutionary narratives. By the mid-1980s, however, sociobiological narratives were facing challenges. Perhaps the most successful were mounted by evolutionary theorists who borrowed mathematical models from population biology and used them to explore how Darwinian selection might operate on units of culture as well as on genes. During this period, the original writings on niche construction were also re-examined, and ways were sought to model the process mathematically. These efforts led to the publication in 2003 of the landmark text Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution, by John Odling-Smee, Kevin Laland, and Marcus Feldman. This volume has since become widely influential, not only among theorists of biological and cultural evolution but also among scholars in fields such as ecology and developmental biology, as well as in the human sciences. In anthropology, archaeologists and biological anthropologists in particular have found niche construction theoretically helpful for explaining such phenomena as our ancestors’ ability to outlast other hominin species in the Pleistocene, our success in domesticating plants and animals after ten thousand years ago, and our dramatic remaking of global landscapes and species distributions in what has been called the Anthropocene. As a result, work on niche construction is coming to intersect in provocative ways across the subfields of anthropology with work by sociocultural anthropologists interested in areas such as environmental anthropology, material culture, and multispecies ethnography.

Niche construction and the role of environment : towards a new logic of natural selection explanations

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lynn (Chien-Hui Chiu) Chiu
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Organization Theory ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
External Conditions ◽  
The University ◽  
Population And Environment ◽  
Selection Of

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] I argue that natural selection explanations are not necessarily externalist, i.e. they don't always cite features of the environment as explanans. In the first chapter, I argue against the Propensity Interpretation of Fitness, which attributes fitness to internal abilities of individuals in a common environment, the latter dictating the selection of the population. However, for some populations, individuals construct different internal/external boundaries, preventing an explanatory boundary between internal and external at the level of the population. In the second chapter, I argue that niche construction, the ability of organisms to construct their experienced environments, can be either constitutive of or alternative to natural selection. Both reject explanatory externalism, a core feature of Adaptationism. An example of the latter is Niche Construction Theory, which decomposes population and environment into distinct evolutionary causes: Niche construction is from population to environment, while natural selection is from environment to population. An example of the former is Dialectical Biology and Situated Adaptationism, which show that population and environment resist decomposition into internal and environmental evolutionary causes. In the last chapter, I demonstrate that general Darwinism in organization theory explicitly assumes externalism. When organizations actively construct their conditions, the debates assume that natural selection do not occur or is ineffective. My previous analyses can show that selection occurs even when the organizations are constructing their external conditions.

scholarly journals Niche construction, sources of selection and trait coevolution

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 20160147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Laland ◽  
John Odling-Smee ◽  
John Endler
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Parallel Evolution ◽  
Positive Association ◽  
Multiple Trait ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Local Environments ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Ecological Legacies

Organisms modify and choose components of their local environments. This ‘niche construction’ can alter ecological processes, modify natural selection and contribute to inheritance through ecological legacies. Here, we propose that niche construction initiates and modifies the selection directly affecting the constructor, and on other species, in an orderly, directed and sustained manner. By dependably generating specific environmental states, niche construction co-directs adaptive evolution by imposing a consistent statistical bias on selection. We illustrate how niche construction can generate this evolutionary bias by comparing it with artificial selection. We suggest that it occupies the middle ground between artificial and natural selection. We show how the perspective leads to testable predictions related to: (i) reduced variance in measures of responses to natural selection in the wild; (ii) multiple trait coevolution, including the evolution of sequences of traits and patterns of parallel evolution; and (iii) a positive association between niche construction and biodiversity. More generally, we submit that evolutionary biology would benefit from greater attention to the diverse properties of all sources of selection.

Reply to Connor and Evers (2020): Critique of the Bias of Crowds Model Simply Restates the Model

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Payne ◽  
Heidi A. Vuletich ◽  
Kristjen B. Lundberg
Keyword(s):  
Implicit Bias ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Core ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Implicit Biases ◽  
The Individual

The Bias of Crowds model (Payne, Vuletich, & Lundberg, 2017) argues that implicit bias varies across individuals and across contexts. It is unreliable and weakly associated with behavior at the individual level. But when aggregated to measure context-level effects, the scores become stable and predictive of group-level outcomes. We concluded that the statistical benefits of aggregation are so powerful that researchers should reconceptualize implicit bias as a feature of contexts, and ask new questions about how implicit biases relate to systemic racism. Connor and Evers (2020) critiqued the model, but their critique simply restates the core claims of the model. They agreed that implicit bias varies across individuals and across contexts; that it is unreliable and weakly associated with behavior at the individual level; and that aggregating scores to measure context-level effects makes them more stable and predictive of group-level outcomes. Connor and Evers concluded that implicit bias should be considered to really be noisily measured individual construct because the effects of aggregation are merely statistical. We respond to their specific arguments and then discuss what it means to really be a feature of persons versus situations, and multilevel measurement and theory in psychological science more broadly.

Pathways to Success Through Identity-Based Motivation

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphna Oyserman
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Core ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
The Future ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Future Self ◽  
Fidelity Measures ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Taking Action ◽  
Minimal Effort

Everyone can imagine their future self, even very young children, and this future self is usually positive and education-linked. To make progress toward an aspired future or away from a feared future requires people to plan and take action. Unfortunately, most people often start too late and commit minimal effort to ineffective strategies that lead their attention elsewhere. As a result, their high hopes and earnest resolutions often fall short. In Pathways to Success Through Identity-Based Motivation Daphna Oyserman focuses on situational constraints and affordances that trigger or impede taking action. Focusing on when the future-self matters and how to reduce the shortfall between the self that one aspires to become and the outcomes that one actually attains, Oyserman introduces the reader to the core theoretical framework of identity-based motivation (IBM) theory. IBM theory is the prediction that people prefer to act in identity-congruent ways but that the identity-to-behavior link is opaque for a number of reasons (the future feels far away, difficulty of working on goals is misinterpreted, and strategies for attaining goals do not feel identity-congruent). Oyserman's book goes on to also include the stakes and how the importance of education comes into play as it improves the lives of the individual, their family, and their society. The framework of IBM theory and how to achieve it is broken down into three parts: how to translate identity-based motivation into a practical intervention, an outline of the intervention, and empirical evidence that it works. In addition, the book also includes an implementation manual and fidelity measures for educators utilizing this book to intervene for the improvement of academic outcomes.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Osamu Sawada
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Dual Use ◽  
The Core ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Conventional Implicatures ◽  
Scalar Modifiers

Chapter 1 introduces the aim and the target phenomenon of this book, that is, the dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers and the meaning and use of pragmatic scalar modifiers. After a brief overview of the current views on the notion of conventional implicatures (CIs) and the semantics/pragmatics interface, and observation of data for the dual-use phenomenon of pragmatic scalar modifiers, this book raises questions concerning (i) the similarities and differences between at-issue scalar meanings and CI (not-at-issue) scalar meanings, (ii) variations in pragmatic scalar modifiers, (iii) the interpretations of embedded pragmatic scalar modifiers, and (iv) the historical development of pragmatic scalar modifiers. It then also briefly outlines the core ideas and analytical directions used for answering these questions.

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