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From: Ernest Major <{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: IS A NEW THEORY OF EVOLUTION NEEDED?
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2024 17:55:45 +0000
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On 28/03/2024 03:28, John Harshman wrote:
>> Going back to the real issue though, I'm not sure it's quite what they 
>> mean
>> with niche construction - at least the way I understand them - because 
>> there is no feedback loop from the effect that the bear has on its 
>> environment and subsequent selection pressures. IIRC the example we 
>> got in school were beavers: they are adapted for semi-aquatic life, 
>> AND create more
>> semi-aquatic environments through their building activity which then 
>> again acts
>> on the beaver and increases the pressure on those less well adapted 
>> etc. Or humans. -NS is different in an environment with hospitals than 
>> one without
>>
> I had viewed the term as less restrictive, such that any alteration of 
> behavior in turn altering the selective environment experienced by the 
> organism would count. Darwin leaves open the question of whether change 
> in phenotype or of behavior comes first, but he also suggests mutual 
> feedback between the two. My notion was that it's not the physical 
> environment that counts but the environment as experienced by the 
> organism. Thus a change of food source could count. That would certainly 
> increase the impact of niche construction on evolution and greatly 
> increase the number of examples, which would otherwise be fairly few.

Evolution has a number of feedback loops - between species (arms races), 
between the two sexes of a species (sexual selection), between organisms 
and the environment (niche construction), ... It'd be nice to 
operationalise our understanding of these processes, but I doubt that 
rises to a new theory of evolution.

25 years ago chaos was a hot topic, and Kauffman's research program had 
hopes of bringing self-organisation into the centre of evolutionary 
theory. That, if successful, would have, I think, been a bigger change.

-- 
alias Ernest Major