The Importance of a Constructivist View

摘要

The nascent germ of many novel ideas in biology can be traced directly or indirectly to Darwin. Thus it would probably be unusual if a book with laudatory cover blurbs by such notables as Lord May and Comrade Lewontin did not somehow reach deep into the master's seed bank. Indeed, the ideas expressed in Niche Construction can be seen in outline form in The Origin, traced through key insights of Lewontin, and found emerging, with slightly different tone and tenor, in the authors' earlier works. (Odling-Smee is an anthropologist at Oxford University; Laland, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews; and Feldman, a population geneticist at Stanford University.) In the 1980s, Odling-Smee laid out the basic elements―at least in their qualitative form, precisely as they appear in this book―of a theory of niche-constructing phenotypes. And the book's sections dealing with human evolution build on Feldman's work with Cavalli-Sforza on cultural transmission, also from the 1980s.