Abstract
Over the past decade, niche construction theory (NCT) has been one of the fastest-growing theories or scholarly approaches in the social sciences, especially within archaeology. It was proposed in the biological sciences 25 years ago and is often referred to as a neglected evolutionary mechanism. Given its rapid acceptance by the archaeological community, it is important that scholars consider how it is being applied and look for discrepancies between applications of the concept. Many critical discussions of NCT have already been published, but most of them are in biology journals and may be overlooked by scholars in the social sciences. In this manuscript, my goal is to synthesis the criticisms of NCT, better allowing archaeologists to independently evaluate its usefulness. I focus on the claims of novelty and differences between NCT and other approaches to conceptualizing anthropogenic ecosystem impacts and culture-evolution feedbacks. I argue that the diverse concepts currently included in the wide-reaching purview of NCT are not new, but the terminology is and may be useful to some scholars. If proponents of the concept are able to unify their ideas, it may serve a descriptive function, but given that lack of a testable explanatory mechanism, it does not have a clear heuristic function.
Highlights
Over the past decade, niche construction theory (NCT) has been one of the fastestgrowing theories or scholarly approaches in the social sciences, especially within archaeology
Given that evolutionary theory has been a prominent hallmark of all of these areas of study for nearly a century, it is important for scientists in these fields, especially archaeologists, to consider what novel insights this approach has provided to their field
There have been numerous critical publications on NCT in the biological sciences, but only a few attempts to critically evaluate its effectiveness in the social sciences, for example, Wallach (2016):2595; see Adenzato, 2000; Gerbault, 2012) concluded: “While NCT may serve as a descriptive framework for these [cultural] phenomena, it cannot be said to explain them in any substantive sense
Summary
It is a reoccurring theme in the NCT promotional articles that the ideas it encompasses are divergent from other evolutionary theory (i.e., a new part of the extended evolutionary synthesis; Laland et al, 1999, 2000, 2014, 2015; Odling-Smee et al, 2003; Odling-Smee, 2010; Mesoudi et al, 2006; Danchin et al, 2011; Zeder, 2016, 2017, 2018; Müller, 2017). Niche construction is often referred to in this literature as a neglected evolutionary process, and many supporters claim that it is at odds with mainstream Darwinian thought This claim is boldly epitomized in the title of the one detailed synthesis of NCT: Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Odling-Smee et al, 2003; see Odling-Smee, 2010; Zeder, 2016). These promotional claims often suggest that there was a recent revelation among a few biologists that niche-constructing processes are evolutionarily significant, usually tied to work by Lewontin. I further suggest that much of the critical revisionary rhetoric was used to promote NCT sounds like it came from Lewontin’s criticisms of certain evolutionary biologists from the 1950s to 1970s and were well-accepted by the mid-1990s when NCT premiered
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