Niche construction

von Anna LM Macagno, Eduardo E Zattara, Armin P Moczek & Cris C Ledón-Rettig

por Anna LM Macagno, Eduardo E Zattara, Armin P Moczek & Cris C Ledón-Rettig

Question 3: Why didn’t Waddington’s attempts fix the division?

Question 2: How did biologists attempt to mend the split between development and inheritance in the past?

Introduction

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?

These are exciting times for the study of cultural evolution, with important books appearing regularly. One of these is Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind, by Kevin N Laland, which won the British Psychological Society’s prize for the best academic book of 2017. Kevin has been featured several times on TVOL as a leading proponent of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (for example, here and here). He is a polymath who studies so many subjects that it’s easy to forget the many contributions he has made to the study of cultural evolution—in nonhuman species and computer simulation models in addition to our own species—which are ably summarized in his book. Our interview covers Kevin’s work against the background of the other exciting developments that are taking place.

To coincide with the publication of his latest book, The Philosophy of Social Evolution, philosopher Jonathan Birch is this week's guest blogger on The Brains Blog. Read his series of posts below.