Niche Construction Theory

Abstract

Niche construction theory is placed in its recent historical context, emerging from work challenging sociobiology in the early 1980s. While this initial work was broadly adaptationist, it rapidly took on the dialectical structures advocated by Lewontin and placed organisms as agents within an expanded view of selection. This argument led to a focus upon change in kinds of individual rather than within populations, but the introduction of developmental processes gave niche construction theory a blended variation and transformational perspective on evolution. It is not clear that niche construction theory can make any predictions or give any explanations that cannot be derived from standard evolutionary theory. In response to this niche construction theory has been declared a heuristic for deriving hypotheses differently. However, advocates of developmental niche construction theory have also claimed niche construction to be a distinct evolutionary process associated with a distinct and different view of evolution.