Niche Construction : The Neglected Process In Evolution - Laland Kevin

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Résumé :
The seemingly innocent observation that the activities of organisms bring about changes in environments is so obvious that it seems an unlikely focus for a new line of thinking about evolution. Yet niche construction-as this process of organism-driven environmental modification is known-has hidden complexities. By transforming biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection in extemal environments, niche construction generates feedback in evolution on a scale hitherto underestimated-and in a manner that transforms the evolutionary dynamic. It also plays a critical role in ecology, supporting ecosystem engineering and influencing the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Despite this, niche construction bas been given short shrift in theoretical biology, in part because it cannot be fully understood within the framework of standard evolutionary theory. Wedding evolution and ecology, this book extends evolutionary theory by formally including niche construction and ecological inheritance as additional evolutionary processes. The authors support their historic move with empirical data, theoretical population genetics, and conceptual models. They also describe new research methods capable of testing the theory. They demonstrate how their theory can resolve long-standing problems in ecology, particularly by advancing the sorely needed synthesis of ecology and evolution, and how it offers an evolutionary basis for the human sciences. Already hailed as a pioneering work by some of the world's most influential biologists, this is a rare, potentially field-changing contribution to the Biological sciences.

Sommaire:
["Examples of the four categories of niche construction","The universality of niche construction","Anatomical and behavioral adaptations that may be evolutionary responses to prior perturbational niche construction","Additional elaborations of niche-constructed resources that may be evolutionary responses to prior perturbational niche construction","Physical or behavioral adaptations for regulating niche-constructed resources","Courtship, mating, and parental behavior that may be an evolutionary response to prior perturbational niche construction","Multispecies coevolutionary interactions mediated by niche construction","Multiplicative viabilities with niche construction for diploid genotypes","Viabilities with niche construction for male haplodiploid genotypes","Expressions for the frequency R of the resource R under positive and negative niche construction, with independent renewal and depletion","Comparison of the two selective processes in evolution, natural selection and niche construction","The three universal ecosystem currencies","Process-functional and population-community ecology compared in terms of the subset of ecosystem factors each handles","Sources feedback from niche construction","Fitnesses of individuals with cultural states E or e, and genotypes AA, Aa, and aa","Cultural-transmission parameters."]