Niche Construction Theory
Niche construction is when an organism alters its environment in ways that change how natural selection operates on it, or on other species — the definition used in Joseph Merz's VUW guest lecture on the behavioural crisis, and a mechanism that runs implicitly throughout Paper Two. Niche Construction Theory is one of the four theoretical strands the Human Behavioural Crisis framework integrates, alongside Selection by Consequences (operant conditioning), evolutionary biology, and Exosomatic Energy.
How it applies to the behavioural crisis
Humans are an extreme case of niche construction: rather than simply adapting to a given environment, humanity actively builds the Information Environment it then has to adapt to — cities, markets, media, technology. This is also an ecological inheritance: the constructed environment is passed down to the next generation, who inherit not just genes but the modified niche itself, including whichever Social Norms and contextualised Evolved Impulses that niche currently rewards.
The lecture frames this as placing a design obligation on humanity: "We need to go about niche construction in a way that leaves fitness-relevant consequences of our behaviours proximal enough to influence the neurobiological consequences that influence behavioural selection." In other words, niche construction is not inherently good or bad — it is the mechanism by which the Neurobiological/Fitness Gap either stays open (an information environment that keeps consequences distant) or gets bridged (one deliberately designed to keep them close).
See also
Human Behavioural Crisis · Information Environment · Neurobiological/Fitness Gap · Exosomatic Energy