The scientific study of niche construction dates back to the early writings on ecological succession of William King in the 17th century. There were important 19th century contributions by Charles Darwin (1851) on corals and earthworms (1881), Lewis Henry Morgan (1868) on the beaver, Nathaniel Shaler’s (1892) analyses of how animals affect soils, and Frederic Clements’ (1916) classic work on plant ecological succession.

More recently, Niche Construction Theory was brought to prominence through the foundational 20th century work of developmental biologist Conrad Waddington and evolutionary biologists Richard Lewontin and John Odling-Smee. Also influential was the work of Erwin Schrödinger.

Schrödinger and Waddington’s contributions

Nobel prize winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s (1944) work already implied that niche construction is universal.

Schrödinger pointed out that living organisms are far-from-equilibrium systems relative to their physical surroundings.  To preserve their out-of-equilibrium status, while creating order (structure, organization) in their bodies and their immediate surrounds, Schrödinger emphasized that organisms must actively do work on their environment. In other words, living organisms can only survive by constantly engaging in niche construction. This activity cannot be random: organisms must change environments in systematic, directional ways.

The developmental biologist Conrad Waddington FRS was also an early advocate of the idea. Waddington (1957, 1959) believed that evolutionary theory was incomplete, and suggested that one factor whose significance had not been fully appreciated was niche construction (which he called the exploitive systemThe self-determination by an organism of the nature and intensity of the selective pressures that are exerted on it., the green section in figure below).

He wrote (1959, p1635-6):

Animals … are usually surrounded by a much wider range of environmental conditions than they are willing to inhabit. They live in a highly heterogeneous ‘ambience’, from which they themselves select the particular habitat in which their life will be passed. Thus the animal by its behaviour contributes in a most important way to determining the nature and intensity of the selective pressures which will be exerted on it.

Richard Lewontin’s contribution

Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin (1982, 1983, 2000) brought niche construction theory reasoning to prominence within the evolutionary biology community.

His writings stressed how genes, organisms and environments are in reciprocal interaction with each other in such a way that each is both cause and effect (Lewontin, 1983, p281):

According to Lewontin, this construction process has a number of features:

(1) Organisms determine what is relevant. While stones are part of a thrush’s environment, tree bark is part of a woodpecker’s, and the underside of leaves part of a warbler’s. It is the life activities of these birds that determine which parts of the world, physically accessible to all of them, are actually parts of their environments….

(2) Organisms alter the external world as it becomes part of their environments. All organisms consume resources by taking up minerals, by eating. But they may also create the resources for their own consumption, as when ants make fungus farms, or trees spread out leaves to catch sunlight….

(3) Organisms transduce the physical signals of the external world. Changes in external temperature are not perceived by my liver as thermal changes but as alterations in the concentrations of certain hormones and ions….

(4) Organisms create a statistical pattern of environment different from the pattern in the external world. Organisms, by their life activities, can damp oscillations, for example in food supply by storage, or in temperature by changing their orientation or moving. They can, on the contrary, magnify differences by using small changes in abundance of food types as a cue for switching search images. They can also integrate and differentiate. Plants may flower only when a sufficient number of days above a certain temperature have been accumulated.

Lewontin’s stance can be contrasted with the more traditional view, expressed by fellow evolutionary biologist George Williams  (1992):

Adaptation is always asymmetrical; organisms adapt to their environment, never vice versa.

However, while Lewontin’s articles focused attention on niche construction, they were generally interpreted as a critique of adaptationism, and it was not apparent to most biologists how these ideas could be translated into practical science.

John Odling-Smee and beyond

Oxford biologist John Odling-Smee (1988) was the first person to coin the term niche construction, and the first to make the argument explicit that niche construction should be recognized as an evolutionary process. Odling-Smee (1988) also introduced the concept of ecological inheritanceThe inheritance, via an external environment, of one or more natural selection pressures previously modified by niche-constructing organisms..

Together with Kevin Laland and Marcus Feldman, Odling-Smee began the first systematic investigation of niche construction. The team documented and categorized the extent of niche construction in living organisms, devised methods by which its ecological and evolutionary consequences could be investigated, and derived dedicated theory to explore these questions (Odling-Smee et al. 1996, 2003; Laland et al. 1996, 1999).

Niche construction theory gained prominence amongst evolutionary biologists and ecologists with Odling-Smee et al.’s influential monograph Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (2003). The study of ecosystem engineeringThe modification by organisms of physical surroundings (e.g., light environment, physical habitat structure) so as to modulate the availability of resources or energy fluxes in an ecosystem (a concept that overlaps with niche construction) took off in the mid 1990s (Jones et al. 1994, 1997Jones & Lawton 1995) within ecosystem ecology, adding to the momentum to investigate the effects of organisms on environments.

Additional attempts to model niche construction, and explore its ecological and evolutionary ramifications, followed (e.g. Lehmann 2008; Kylafis & Loreau 2008; van Dyken & Wade 2012). Over the next decade research into niche construction increased rapidly, with a large number of experimental and theoretical studies across a broad range of fields. Several influential academic books make niche construction a central concept.

In 2015, evolutionary ecologist Sonia Sultan published Organism & Environment: Ecological Development, Niche Construction, and Adaptation.  Sultan documents extensive evidence for niche construction and its evolutionary consequences, across a wide variety of taxa, and develops the concept of niche construction in important respects.