Speakers
Description
Evolutionary adaptation is typically accredited to natural selection. However, natural selection can only adapt populations, and by itself has little to offer to locally maladapted individuals. Because of this, flexible individual responses have evolved that can help individuals to increase their fitness. By means of a simple yet apparently comprehensive classification framework, I will derive that only three such responses can exist (as appears to be confirmed from the social and economic sciences): adjustment of the phenotype (e.g. plasticity), adjustment of the environment (e.g. niche construction), and selection of the environment (e.g. habitat choice). I will then explore to what extent, and under what conditions, these flexible responses can additionally and independently drive adaptive evolution (touching upon discussions surrounding the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and the Extended Phenotype). This framework can help to shift our evolutionary thinking from an organism- and gene-centred position towards that of the evolution of the organism-environment interaction via genetic and alternative hereditary means.
