Niche construction

Last month, researchers from around the world gathered at the Santa Fe Institute to discuss the evolutionary implications of extra-genetic inheritance. The workshop – Integrating Development and Inheritance – was organized as part of the EES research program. For two and a half days the participants – biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers of science – presented their work and took part in lively and constructive discussions about the nature of inheritance and why it matters to evolution.

Within the blink of an eye on a geological timescale, humans advanced from using basic stone tools to studying the rocks on Mars; however, our exact evolutionary path and the relative importance of genetic and cultural evolution remain a mystery. Our cultural capacities—to create new ideas, to communicate and learn from one another, and to form vast social networks—together make us uniquely human, but the origins, the mechanisms, and the evolutionary impact of these capacities remain unknown.

It is an intellectual riddle—why is it that the biological and social sciences are divided into so many separate fields? If there was a “new synthesis” for evolutionary biology almost a hundred years ago, how did it manage to exclude (or get excluded by) the burgeoning fields of research that study the social behaviors of humans?