Review article
https://doi.org/10.17234/SocEkol.33.2.3
Theory of niche construction in evolutionary biology and ecology
Nebojša Mudri
; Clinical Medical Center Osijek, Osijek, Croatia
*
* Corresponding author.
Abstract
Do the theses on the intersubjective construction of reality, known from phenomenological philosophy and sociology, have a foundation in natural sciences? We answer this question in the affirmative from the position of the extended evolutionary synthesis, for which evolution means more than a generational change in the characteristics of groups of organisms under the selection pressure of the environment in which they find themselves. Contemporary theorizing of the multilevel empirical correlation of the subject and the surrounding world from a biological and ecological perspective assumes a more precise determination of how organisms construct their own niches, implying a process by which living beings significantly alter their environment through their actions, which in turn leads to evolutionary change. Every organism, not just humans, is also an object in the world, subject to physical forces and transformations of matter and energy, as well as a subject to the world it creates by shaping it through its autonomous behavior. Living things are subject to natural selection, which is why only those that are able to respond to external biotic and abiotic challenges survive and reproduce, but at the same time organisms themselves influence the course of evolution by shaping their own environment and changing selection pressures. Just as there is no organism
without the environment, because it is not only a source of material that a living being processes, but also an extension of its bodily functions, so there is no world that surrounds it without an organism that gives it meaning through its actions and changes the conditions for the further evolutionary development of its own and other species with which it is in a complex relationship within the ecosystem.
Keywords
niche construction; extended evolutionary synthesis; bidirectional adaptation; design of the living world
Hrčak ID:
319915
URI
Publication date:
28.7.2024.
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