The adaptive legacy of human evolution: A search for the environment of evolutionary adaptedness

The growth of evolutionary psychology has led to renewed interest in what might be the significant evolutionary heritage of people living today, and in the extent to which humans are suited to a particular adaptive environment—the EEA. The EEA, though, is a new tool in the battery of evolutionary concepts, and it is important both that it is scrutinized for its utility, and that the actual reconstructions of the environments in which humans and hominids evolved are based on sound palaeobiological inference and an appropriate use of the phylogenetic context of primate evolution.     

Exploring gene-culture interactions: insights from handedness, sexual selection and niche-construction case studies

Genes and culture represent two streams of inheritance that for millions of years have flowed down the generations and interacted. Genetic propensities, expressed throughout development, influence what cultural organisms learn. Culturally transmitted information, expressed in behaviour and artefacts, spreads through populations, modifying selection acting back on populations. Drawing on three case studies, I will illustrate how this gene-culture coevolution has played a critical role in human evolution. These studies explore (i) the evolution of handedness, (ii) sexual selection with a culturally transmitted mating preference, and (iii) cultural niche construction and human evolution. These analyses shed light on how genes and culture shape each other, and on the significance of feedback mechanisms between biological and cultural processes.     

Cultural niche construction and human evolution

Organisms frequently choose, regulate, construct and destroy important components of their environments, in the process changing the selection pressures to which they and other organisms are exposed. We refer to these processes as niche construction. In humans, culture has greatly amplified our capacity for niche construction and our ability to modify selection pressures. We use gene‐culture coevolutionary models to explore the evolutionary consequences of culturally generated niche construction through human evolution. Our analysis suggests that where cultural traits are transmitted in an unbiased fashion from parent to offspring, cultural niche construction will have a similar effect to gene‐based niche construction. However, cultural transmission biases favouring particular cultural traits may either increase or reduce the range of parameter space over which niche construction has an impact, which means that niche construction with biased transmission will either have a much smaller or a much bigger effect than gene‐based niche construction. The analysis also reveals circumstances under which cultural transmission can overwhelm natural selection, accelerate the rate at which a favoured gene spreads, initiate novel evolutionary events and trigger hominid speciation. Because cultural processes typically operate faster than natural selection, cultural niche construction probably has more profound consequences than gene‐based niche construction, and is likely to have played an important role in human evolution.     

Some Recent Developments in Evolutionary Approaches to the Study of Human Cognition and Behavior

In this paper I review some theoretical exchanges and empiricalresults from recent work on human behavior and cognition in thehope of indicating some productive avenues for critical engagement.I focus particular attention on methodological debates between Evolutionary Psychologists and behavioral ecologists. I argue for a broader and more encompassing approach to the evolutionarily based study of human behavior and cognition than either of these two rivals present.     

Building the microbiome in health and disease: niche construction and social conflict in bacteria

Microbes collectively shape their environment in remarkable ways via the products of their metabolism. The diverse environmental impacts of macro-organisms have been collated and reviewed under the banner of ‘niche construction’. Here, we identify and review a series of broad and overlapping classes of bacterial niche construction, ranging from biofilm production to detoxification or release of toxins, enzymes, metabolites and viruses, and review their role in shaping microbiome composition, human health and disease. Some bacterial niche-constructing traits can be seen as extended phenotypes, where individuals actively tailor their environment to their benefit (and potentially to the benefit of others, generating social dilemmas). Other modifications can be viewed as non-adaptive by-products from a producer perspective, yet they may lead to remarkable within-host environmental changes. We illustrate how social evolution and niche construction perspectives offer complementary insights into the dynamics and consequences of these traits across distinct timescales. This review highlights that by understanding the coupled bacterial and biochemical dynamics in human health and disease we can better manage host health.     

Social intelligence, human intelligence and niche construction

This paper is about the evolution of hominin intelligence. I agree with defenders of the social intelligence hypothesis in thinking that externalist models of hominin intelligence are not plausible: such models cannot explain the unique cognition and cooperation explosion in our lineage, for changes in the external environment (e.g. increasing environmental unpredictability) affect many lineages. Both the social intelligence hypothesis and the social intelligence-ecological complexity hybrid I outline here are niche construction models. Hominin evolution is hominin response to selective environments that earlier hominins have made. In contrast to social intelligence models, I argue that hominins have both created and responded to a unique foraging mode; a mode that is both social in itself and which has further effects on hominin social environments. In contrast to some social intelligence models, on this view, hominin encounters with their ecological environments continue to have profound selective effects. However, though the ecological environment selects, it does not select on its own. Accidents and their consequences, differential success and failure, result from the combination of the ecological environment an agent faces and the social features that enhance some opportunities and suppress others and that exacerbate some dangers and lessen others. Individuals do not face the ecological filters on their environment alone, but with others, and with the technology, information and misinformation that their social world provides.     

Niche construction on Bali: the gods of the countryside

Human niche construction encompasses both purely biological phenomena, such as the evolution of lactose tolerance, and dual inheritance theory, which investigates the transmission of cultural information. But does niche construction help to explain phenomena in which conscious intention also plays a role? The creation of the engineered landscape of Balinese rice terraces offers a test case. Population genetic analysis and archaeological evidence are used to investigate whether this phenomenon emerged historically from trial and error by generations of farmers, or alternatively was designed by Bali''s rulers. In light of strong support for the former hypothesis, two models are developed to explore the emergence of functional structure at both local and global scales. As time goes forward and selected patterns of irrigation schedules are implemented, local variation in rice harvests influences future decisions by the farmers, creating a coupled human–natural system governed by feedback from the environment. This mathematical analysis received a measure of empirical support when government agricultural policies severed the local feedback channels, resulting in the almost instantaneous collapse of rice harvests. The historical process of niche construction may also have included an evolution of religious consciousness, reflected in the beliefs and practices of the water temple cult.     

Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus

Niche construction is an endogenous causal process in evolution, reciprocal to the causal process of natural selection. It works by adding ecological inheritance, comprising the inheritance of natural selection pressures previously modified by niche construction, to genetic inheritance in evolution. Human niche construction modifies selection pressures in environments in ways that affect both human evolution, and the evolution of other species. Human ecological inheritance is exceptionally potent because it includes the social transmission and inheritance of cultural knowledge, and material culture. Human genetic inheritance in combination with human cultural inheritance thus provides a basis for gene-culture coevolution, and multivariate dynamics in cultural evolution. Niche construction theory potentially integrates the biological and social aspects of the human sciences. We elaborate on these processes, and provide brief introductions to each of the papers published in this theme issue.     

Out of Africa and the evolution of human behavior

Twenty‐one years ago, a landmark exploration of mitochondrial DNA diversity popularized the idea of a recent African origin for all living humans. 1 The ancestral African population was estimated to have existed 200 ka (thousands of years ago) plus or minus a few tens of thousands of years. A corollary was that at some later date the fully modern African descendants of that population expanded to swamp or replace the Neanderthals and other nonmodern Eurasians. The basic concept soon became known as “Out of Africa,” after the Academy Award winning film (1985) that took its title, in turn, from Isak Dinesen's classic autobiography (1937). Many subsequent genetic analyses, including those of Ingman and coworkers 2 and Underhill and coworkers, 3 have reaffirmed the fundamental Out of Africa model. The fossil and archeological records also support it strongly. The fossil record implies that anatomically modern or near‐modern humans were present in Africa by 150 ka; the fossil and archeological records together indicate that modern Africans expanded to Eurasia beginning about 50 ka.     

Introduction. Cultural transmission and the evolution of human behaviour

The articles in this theme issue seek to understand the evolutionary bases of social learning and the consequences of cultural transmission for the evolution of human behaviour. In this introductory article, we provide a summary of these articles (seven articles on the experimental exploration of cultural transmission and three articles on the role of gene-culture coevolution in shaping human behaviour) and a personal view of some promising lines of development suggested by the work summarized here.     

Culture, embodiment and genes: unravelling the triple helix

Much recent work stresses the role of embodiment and action in thought and reason, and celebrates the power of transmitted cultural and environmental structures to transform the problem-solving activity required of individual brains. By apparent contrast, much work in evolutionary psychology has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to an ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness, with an attendant stress upon the limitations and cognitive biases that result. On the face of it, this suggests either a tension or, at least, a mismatch, with the symbiotic dyad of cultural evolution and embodied cognition. In what follows, we explore this mismatch by focusing on three key ideas: cognitive niche construction; cognitive modularity; and the existence (or otherwise) of an evolved universal human nature. An appreciation of the power and scope of the first, combined with consequently more nuanced visions of the latter two, allow us to begin to glimpse a much richer vision of the combined interactive potency of biological and cultural evolution for active, embodied agents.     

生态位模型的理论基础、发展方向与挑战

生态位模型是一个以生态位理论为基础的新兴研究领域.它通过采集研究对象的已知分布点及其相关的环境数据组成训练样本,利用数理统计或机器学习理论分析数据,构建特征函数表示物种在生态位空间的实际生态位.以生态位模型预测物种潜在分布地或计算物种间的生态位重叠等研究,在生态学、生物地理学和进化生物学研究中显得越来越重要.本文从生态位概念出发,详细解析了生态位模型的理论基础、相关的焦点争论、使用时的注意点以及可能的发展方向与面临的挑战,指出模型中要考虑人类活动对物种生态位的影响.希望本文所探讨的本领域最新的争论焦点能引起相关学者的关注与深入思考.     

Niche overlap in allotopic and syntopic populations of sexually interacting ground‐hopper species

Abstract There is accumulating evidence that sexual interactions among species (reproductive interference) could have dramatic effects for species’ coexistence. It has been shown that the fitness of individuals can be substantially reduced as a consequence of reproductive interference. This might subsequently lead to displacement of a species (sexual exclusion). On the other hand, some evolutionary and ecological mechanisms might enable species to coexist, such as the divergence of mate recognition systems (reproductive character displacement), habitat partitioning, clumped dispersion patterns or different colonization capabilities. We have previously shown that the two ground‐hopper species Tetrix subulata and Tetrix ceperoi interact sexually in the laboratory as well as in the field. At sites where both species co‐occur niche overlap was high, suggesting that coexistence is maintained by different niche breadths rather than by habitat partitioning. To test the hypothesis that habitat partitioning does not contribute to species’ coexistence, we examined whether allotopic and syntopic populations of these two species differ in niche overlap (competitive release). Our results show that niche overlap is higher in syntopic than in allotopic populations, suggesting that the site‐specific habitat structure (heterogeneity) has a stronger influence on microhabitat utilization than the presence of heterospecifics. Hence, our data do not support the hypothesis that habitat partitioning plays a substantial role for the coexistence of these sexually interacting species.     

Runaway cultural niche construction

Cultural niche construction is a uniquely potent source of selection on human populations, and a major cause of recent human evolution. Previous theoretical analyses have not, however, explored the local effects of cultural niche construction. Here, we use spatially explicit coevolutionary models to investigate how cultural processes could drive selection on human genes by modifying local resources. We show that cultural learning, expressed in local niche construction, can trigger a process with dynamics that resemble runaway sexual selection. Under a broad range of conditions, cultural niche-constructing practices generate selection for gene-based traits and hitchhike to fixation through the build up of statistical associations between practice and trait. This process can occur even when the cultural practice is costly, or is subject to counteracting transmission biases, or the genetic trait is selected against. Under some conditions a secondary hitchhiking occurs, through which genetic variants that enhance the capability for cultural learning are also favoured by similar dynamics. We suggest that runaway cultural niche construction could have played an important role in human evolution, helping to explain why humans are simultaneously the species with the largest relative brain size, the most potent capacity for niche construction and the greatest reliance on culture.     

A prolegomenon to nonlinear empiricism in the human behavioral sciences

We propose a general framework for integrating theory and empiricism in human evolutionary ecology. We specifically emphasize the joint use of stochastic nonlinear dynamics and information theory. To illustrate critical ideas associated with historical contingency and complex dynamics, we review recent research on social preferences and social learning from behavioral economics. We additionally examine recent work on ecological approaches in history, the modeling of chaotic populations, and statistical application of information theory.