Niche Construction

Niche Construction
Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Total Pages : 489
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781400847266
ISBN-13 : 1400847265
Rating : 4/5 (265 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Niche Construction by : F. John Odling-Smee

Download or read book Niche Construction written by F. John Odling-Smee and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seemingly innocent observation that the activities of organisms bring about changes in environments is so obvious that it seems an unlikely focus for a new line of thinking about evolution. Yet niche construction--as this process of organism-driven environmental modification is known--has hidden complexities. By transforming biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection in external environments, niche construction generates feedback in evolution on a scale hitherto underestimated--and in a manner that transforms the evolutionary dynamic. It also plays a critical role in ecology, supporting ecosystem engineering and influencing the flow of energy and nutrients through ecosystems. Despite this, niche construction has been given short shrift in theoretical biology, in part because it cannot be fully understood within the framework of standard evolutionary theory. Wedding evolution and ecology, this book extends evolutionary theory by formally including niche construction and ecological inheritance as additional evolutionary processes. The authors support their historic move with empirical data, theoretical population genetics, and conceptual models. They also describe new research methods capable of testing the theory. They demonstrate how their theory can resolve long-standing problems in ecology, particularly by advancing the sorely needed synthesis of ecology and evolution, and how it offers an evolutionary basis for the human sciences. Already hailed as a pioneering work by some of the world's most influential biologists, this is a rare, potentially field-changing contribution to the biological sciences.


Niche Construction Related Books

Niche Construction
Language: en
Pages: 489
Authors: F. John Odling-Smee
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-02-15 - Publisher: Princeton University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The seemingly innocent observation that the activities of organisms bring about changes in environments is so obvious that it seems an unlikely focus for a new
Building Evolutionary Architectures
Language: en
Pages: 217
Authors: Neal Ford
Categories: Computers
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-09-18 - Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The software development ecosystem is constantly changing, providing a constant stream of new tools, frameworks, techniques, and paradigms. Over the past few ye
Hayek, Mill and the Liberal Tradition
Language: en
Pages: 192
Authors: Andrew Farrant
Categories: Business & Economics
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-11-23 - Publisher: Routledge

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via www.tandfebooks.com as well as the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. It has been made a
The Evolution of Grammar
Language: en
Pages: 420
Authors: Joan Bybee
Categories: Language Arts & Disciplines
Type: BOOK - Published: 1994-11-15 - Publisher: University of Chicago Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contempor
A Unifying Theory of Evolution Generated by Means of Information Modelling
Language: en
Pages: 236
Authors: J. Brender McNair
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-09-13 - Publisher: IOS Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Stringent ways of thinking, ‘conceptual frameworks’, are necessary in science. The drawback is that the associated assumptions, concepts, rules and practice