What can reason do for us and what can't it do? This is the question examined by Herbert A. Simon, who received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering work on decision-making processes in economic organizations." The ability to apply reason to the choice of actions is supposed to be one of the defining characteristics of our species. In the first two chapters, the author explores the nature and limits of human reason, comparing and evaluating the major (...) theoretical frameworks that have been erected to explain reasoning processes. He also discusses the interaction of thinking and emotion in the choice of our actions. In the third and final chapter, the author applies the theory of bounded rationality to social institutions and human behavior, and points out the problems created by limited attention span human inability to deal with more than one difficult problem at a time. He concludes that we must recognize the limitations on our capabilities for rational choice and pursue goals that, in their tentativeness and flexibility, are compatible with those limits. (shrink)

Human behavior is the joint product of (i) contingencies of survival responsible for natural selection, and (ii) contingencies of reinforcement responsible for the repertoires of individuals, including (iii) the special contingencies maintained by an evolved social environment. Selection by consequences is a causal mode found only in living things, or in machines made by living things. It was first recognized in natural selection: Reproduction, a first consequence, led to the evolution of cells, organs, and organisms reproducing themselves under increasingly diverse (...) conditions. The behavior functioned well, however, only under conditions similar to those under which it was selected.Reproduction under a wider range of consequences became possible with the evolution of processes through which organisms acquired behavior appropriate to novel environments. One of these, operant conditioning, is a second kind of selection by consequences: New responses could be strengthened by events which followed them. When the selecting consequences are the same, operant conditioning and natural selection work together redundantly. But because a species which quickly acquires behavior appropriate to an environment has less need for an innate repertoire, operant conditioning could replace as well as supplement the natural selection of behavior.Social behavior is within easy range of natural selection, because other members are one of the most stable features of the environment of a species. The human species presumably became more social when its vocal musculature came under operant control. Verbal behavior greatly increased the importance of a third kind of selection by consequences, the evolution of social environments or cultures. The effect on the group, and not the reinforcing consequences for individual members, is responsible for the evolution of culture. (shrink)

Niche construction theory (NCT) is distinctive for being explicit in recognizing environmental modification by organisms—niche construction—and its legacy—ecological inheritance—to be evolutionary processes in their own right. Humans are widely regarded as champion niche constructors, largely as a direct result of our capacity for the cultural transmission of knowledge and its expression in human behavior, engineering, and technology. This raises the question of how human ecological inheritance relates to human cultural inheritance. If NCT is to provide a conceptual framework for the (...) human sciences, then it is important that the relationship between these two legacies is clear. We suggest that cultural processes and cultural inheritance can be viewed as the primary means by which humans engage in the universal process of niche construction. (shrink)

achieved by the actions of a single animal. The concerted activity is coordinated by a multiplicity of cues and signals diffused between groups of ...

One of our most brilliant evolutionary biologists, Richard Lewontin has also been a leading critic of those--scientists and non-scientists alike--who would misuse the science to which he has contributed so much. In The Triple Helix, Lewontin the scientist and Lewontin the critic come together to provide a concise, accessible account of what his work has taught him about biology and about its relevance to human affairs. In the process, he exposes some of the common and troubling misconceptions that misdirect and (...) stall our understanding of biology and evolution.The central message of this book is that we will never fully understand living things if we continue to think of genes, organisms, and environments as separate entities, each with its distinct role to play in the history and operation of organic processes. Here Lewontin shows that an organism is a unique consequence of both genes and environment, of both internal and external features. Rejecting the notion that genes determine the organism, which then adapts to the environment, he explains that organisms, influenced in their development by their circumstances, in turn create, modify, and choose the environment in which they live.The Triple Helix is vintage Lewontin: brilliant, eloquent, passionate, and deeply critical. But it is neither a manifesto for a radical new methodology nor a brief for a new theory. It is instead a primer on the complexity of biological processes, a reminder to all of us that living things are never as simple as they may seem. (shrink)

Bringing together evolutionary biology, psychology, and philosophy, Henry Plotkin presents a new science of knowledge, one that traces an unbreakable link between instinct and our ability to know.

We propose a conceptual model that maps the causal pathways relating biological evolution to cultural change. It builds on conventional evolutionary theory by placing emphasis on the capacity of organisms to modify sources of natural selection in their environment (niche construction) and by broadening the evolutionary dynamic to incorporate ontogenetic and cultural processes. In this model, phenotypes have a much more active role in evolution than generally conceived. This sheds light on hominid evolution, on the evolution of culture, and on (...) altruism and cooperation. Culture amplifies the capacity of human beings to modify sources of natural selection in their environments to the point where that capacity raises some new questions about the processes of human adaptation. Key Words: adaptation; altruism; cooperation; evolutionary psychology; gene-culture coevolution; human evolution; human genetics; niche construction; sociobiology. (shrink)

The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has excited interest from a wide range of researchers, from (...) molecular biologists to anthropologists, because of its ability to integrate evolutionary theory and other disciplines without falling into traditional oppositions. The book provides historical background to DST, recent theoretical findings on the mechanisms of heredity, applications of the DST framework to behavioral development, implications of DST for the philosophy of biology, and critical reactions to DST. (shrink)

The term “legacy effect” has been used in ecology since the early 1990s by authors studying plant succession, invasive-plant impacts, herbivory impacts, ecosystem engineering, and human land-use impacts. Although there is some variability in usage, the term is normally used to describe impacts of a species on abiotic or biotic features of ecosystems that persist for a long time after the species has been extirpated or ceased activity and which have an effect on other species. For example, human agricultural activities (...) may have a legacy effect on soil structure and vegetative communities that lasts for centuries and which alters current communities. The concept may be related to the idea of ecological inheritance in evolutionary biology but would refer only to a subset of the features of this concept. In particular, legacy effects could refer to those kinds of ecological inheritance where a physical or biological change in ecosystem state is caused by one species, where this change persists after the extirpation of the causal species and alters selection pressure of another species much later in time. (shrink)

Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.

We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with (...) the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in “social cognitive neuroscience,” although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences. (shrink)

Intraspecific niche variation can differentially impact community processes and can represent the initial stages of adaptive radiation. Here we test for intraspecific differences in niche use in a keystone species, the alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus). To test whether feedbacks between predator foraging traits and prey communities have led to differences in niche use, we compare the diet composition and trophic position of anadromous and landlocked alewife populations. These populations differ in phenotypic traits related to foraging (gill raker spacing, gape width, and (...) prey selectivity). Trait differences appear to have resulted from eco-evolutionary feedbacks between alewives and their zooplankton prey, and suggest that these two life history forms are exploiting different niches. Direct diets show that anadromous alewives consume a greater biomass of predatory copepods than do landlocked alewives. Anadromous alewives also consume more ostracods—a littoral prey item—as the growing season progresses. These diet differences do not translate into a significant difference in trophic position, as estimated from stable isotopes. However, stable-isotope estimates of diet source show that during early fall, anadromous alewives obtain significantly more of their dietary carbon from the littoral food web. This increased reliance on littoral prey is likely a result of a diet switch that occurs in response to the alewife-driven exhaustion of large-bodied prey items available in the pelagic zone, i.e., alewife niche construction. These findings show the existence of important intraspecific niche differences in the alewife and support the role of eco-evolutionary feedbacks in shaping these niche differences. The initiation of alewife divergence is the result of dam building by humans. Therefore, alewife niche differentiation can be considered to be an eco-evolutionary byproduct of human cultural niche construction. (shrink)

I present a general theory for the initial domestication of plants and animals that is based on niche construction theory and incorporates several behavioral ecological concepts, including central-place provisioning, resource catchment, resource ownership and defensibility, and traditional ecological knowledge. This theory provides an alternative to, and replacement for, current explanations, including diet breadth models of optimal foraging theory, that are based on an outmoded concept of asymmetrical adaptation and that attempt to explain domestication as an adaptive response to resource imbalance (...) resulting from either environmental decline or human population growth. The small-scale human societies that first domesticated plants and animals share a number of basic interrelated attributes that when considered as an integrated and coherent set of behaviors provide the context for explaining initial domestication not as an adaptive response to an adverse environmental shift or to human population growth or packing but rather as the result of deliberate human enhancement of resource-rich environments in situations where evidence of resource imbalance is absent. (shrink)

In the study reported here we examined the impact of population size and two proxies of risk of resource failure on the diversity and complexity of the food-getting toolkits of hunter–gatherers and small-scale food producers. We tested three hypotheses: the risk hypothesis, the population-size hypothesis, and a hypothesis derived from niche construction theory. Our analyses indicated that the toolkits of hunter–gatherers are more affected by risk than are the toolkits of food producers. They also showed that the toolkits of food (...) producers are more affected by population size than are the toolkits of hunter–gatherers. This pattern is inconsistent with the predictions of both the risk hypothesis and the population-size hypothesis. In contrast, it is consistent with the predictions of the niche construction hypothesis. Our results indicate that niche construction has affected the evolution of technology in small-scale societies and imply that niche construction must be taken into account when seeking to understand technological variation among food producers and the technological changes that occurred in association with the various transitions to farming that have occurred over the last 10,000 years. (shrink)

Niche construction theory (NCT) can be applied to examine the influence of culturally constructed learning environments on the acquisition and retention of beliefs, values, role expectations, and skills. Thus, NCT provides a quantitative framework to account for cultural-historical contingency affecting development and cultural evolution. Learning in a culturally constructed environment is of central concern to many sociologists, cognitive scientists, and sociocultural anthropologists, albeit often from different perspectives. This article summarizes four pertinent theories from these fields—situated learning, activity theory, practice theory, (...) and distributed cognition. As a basis for interdisciplinary investigation, the article considers how these theories may be addressed using a cultural niche-construction framework, including the utility of an embedded model that explicitly accounts for effects of the constructed learning environment on within-individual learning dynamics in an evolutionary framework. (shrink)

The use of socially learned information (culture) is central to human adaptations. We investigate the hypothesis that the process of cultural evolution has played an active, leading role in the evolution of genes. Culture normally evolves more rapidly than genes, creating novel environments that expose genes to new selective pressures. Many human genes that have been shown to be under recent or current selection are changing as a result of new environments created by cultural innovations. Some changed in response to (...) the development of agricultural subsistence systems in the Early and Middle Holocene. Alleles coding for adaptations to diets rich in plant starch (e.g., amylase copy number) and to epidemic diseases evolved as human populations expanded (e.g., sickle cell and G6PD defi- ciency alleles that provide protection against malaria). Large-scale scans using patterns of linkage disequilibrium to detect recent selection suggest that many more genes evolved in response to agriculture. Genetic change in response to the novel social environment of contemporary modern societies is also likely to be occurring. The functional effects of most of the alleles under selection during the last 10,000 years are currently unknown. Also unknown is the role of paleoenvironmental change in regulating the tempo of hominin evolution. Although the full extent of culture-driven gene-culture coevolution is thus far unknown for the deeper history of the human lineage, theory and some evidence suggest that such effects were profound. Genomic methods promise to have a major impact on our understanding of gene-culture coevolution over the span of hominin evolutionary history. (shrink)

A skew in sex ratio at birth occurs across much of Asia and North Africa. The resulting gender imbalance in favor of men in the adult population causes a number of serious social problems, including increased violence against women and an increasing number of “forced bachelors” in many areas. Here we concentrate on the sex ratio at birth in China and model two causal factors specific to Chinese culture: a traditional preference for sons over daughters and a preference for brides (...) to move to their husband’s natal home (virilocal marriage). We use cultural niche construction models to explore the interacting effect of both son preference and marriage-type preference on the demography of the region. Finally, we discuss the implications of this model for policy interventions in the future. (shrink)

The developmental importance to humans of the human-constructed physical environment, including myriad modified natural objects or manufactured objects, is well recognized. The importance of the physical dimension of the constructed niche has also been recognized in nonhuman animals with respect to dwellings (e.g., beavers’ dams, birds’ nests, and bees’ hives), but has not previously been applied to technical traditions, despite the fact that enduring alterations of the physical environment left by social partners are part of the constructed niche that supports (...) the learning of technical skills through the phenomenon of delayed social facilitation. These alterations aid learning over a longer time scale than the actions themselves. Thus, technical skills that result in enduring physical artifacts, which themselves aid learning the skills, should be both more persistent in a population and more widespread than technical skills that do not share this feature. This perspective gives us a new lens through which to understand the origins of technical traditions in nonhuman animals, and by extension, in human ancestors. Understanding the process by which traditional technical skills are acquired in nonhuman species gives us insight into the ways that the combination of social and physical niche construction can support the evolution of technical aspects of culture from modest beginnings. (shrink)

The fundamental tenet of contemporary sociobiology, namely the assumption of a single process of evolution involving the selection of genes, is critically examined. An alternative multiple-level, multiple-process model of evolution is presented which posits that the primary process that operates via selection upon the genes cannot account for certain kinds of biological phenomena, especially complex, learned, social behaviours. The primary process has evolved subsidiary evolutionary levels and processes that act to bridge the gap between genes and these complex behaviours. The (...) subsidiary levels are development, individual animal learning, and socioculture itself. It is argued that individual learning is pivotal to the derivation and biological analysis of culture. The differences between cultural and noncultural societies are stressed. It is concluded that such a multiple-level model of evolution can form the basis for reconciling opposing sides in the sociobiology debate. (shrink)

In modern evolutionary theory, selection acts on particular genes and assemblages of genes that operate through phenotypes expressed in environments. This view, however, overlooks the fact that organisms often alter their environments in pursuit of fitness needs and thus modify some environmental selection pressures. Niche construction theory introduces a reciprocal causal process that modifies natural selection relative to three general kinds of environmental components: abiota, biota (other organisms), and artifacts. The ways in which niche-constructing organisms can construct or modify the (...) components differ. Modification of abiota, for example, may have different consequences from the construction of artifacts. Some changes in abiota may simply be caused by the by-products of metabolisms and activities of organisms. Alternatively, artifacts may be “extended phenotypes” that demonstrate obvious prior “design” and “construction” by organisms in the service of fitness needs. Nevertheless, adaptation should always account for the reciprocity between constructed niches and the living agents that construct them. Looking to well-adapted nature for inspiration for human-built artifacts must account for this reciprocity between phenotype and constructed environment as well as the novel features of human architecture, including frank intentionality of design and novel culturally acquired knowledge. (shrink)