Niche Construction

Abstract

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.