Скачать или смотреть What Is Human Niche Construction? Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Explained (2020)

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How do humans actively shape their own evolutionary trajectory? This lecture explores Agustin Fuentes's argument for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis—going beyond the selection-focused standard approach to understand how human culture transforms the conditions of our own evolution.
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🌍 Human Origins: https://www.livinganthropologically.c...

⚡ *KEY CONCEPTS*
🧬 *Modern Evolutionary Synthesis*
The neo-Darwinian paradigm combining Darwin's natural selection with Mendelian genetics—the standard approach most of us learned in biology class.

🔄 *Extended Evolutionary Synthesis*
Fuentes argues we need to go beyond selection-focused approaches to include niche construction, ecological inheritance, and multiple modes of inheritance.

🏗️ *Niche Construction*
Organisms don't just adapt to environments—they actively alter them. Beaver dams, bird nests, even breathing out CO2. These alterations change selection conditions for the next generation.

👶 *Ecological Inheritance*
Baby beavers grow up in environments their parents modified. Humans grow up in classrooms, cities, and built environments that didn't exist 300 years ago.

🥛 *Lactose Tolerance Example*
Cultural dependence on cattle in Northern Europe, West Africa, and parts of India led to genetic changes enabling adult milk digestion—in just 10,000-15,000 years. Not a racial trait—a cultural-evolutionary trade-off.

🧠 *The Human Niche*
Humans excel at using "extrasomatic materials" (tools) to reshape environments, creating feedback loops that alter how the next generation develops.

🌱 *Human Nature as "Suite of Potentials"*
Fuentes argues human nature isn't fixed universal traits but flexible capacities shaped by our evolutionary history and our ability to create and be shaped by culture.

🔀 *Active Evolution*
Evolution isn't passive adaptation—organisms play active roles through migration, mate selection, and environmental modification.

💡 *WHY THIS MATTERS*
Understanding niche construction transforms how we think about human nature. We're not prisoners of our genes or passive products of natural selection—we're active participants in our own evolutionary story. This perspective offers hope: if culture shapes biology, then changing our cultural practices can reshape our futures.

🌱 *CONTINUE YOUR JOURNEY*
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