Brown Melissa J
Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
Hum Nat. 2016 Dec;27(4):501-532. doi: 10.1007/s12110-016-9268-5.
The incorporation of niche construction theory (NCT) and epigenetics into an extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) increases the explanatory power of evolutionary analyses of human history. NCT allows identification of distinct social inheritance and cultural inheritance and can thereby account for how an existing-but-dynamic social system yields variable influences across individuals and also how these individuals' microlevel actions can feed back to alter the dynamic heterogeneously across time and space. An analysis of Chinese footbinding, as it was ending during the first half of the twentieth century and China was industrializing, illustrates the evolutionary dynamics of niche construction across inheritance tracks and explains regional heterogeneity as well as the persistence of a cultural belief that was socially inaccurate. Incorporating anthropological and sociological insights into an EES with NCT has the potential to proffer source laws for relationships between individual actions and macro-patterns in beliefs, structures, climate, and demography.
将生态位构建理论（NCT）和表观遗传学纳入扩展进化综合理论（EES），增强了对人类历史进化分析的解释力。NCT有助于识别独特的社会遗传和文化遗传，从而解释现存但动态的社会系统如何对个体产生不同影响，以及这些个体的微观行为如何反馈，在不同时间和空间中以异质性方式改变动态。对中国缠足现象的分析（缠足在20世纪上半叶逐渐终结，当时中国正在工业化），阐释了生态位构建在不同遗传轨迹上的进化动态，并解释了区域异质性以及一种在社会层面并不准确的文化信仰的持续存在。将人类学和社会学见解与NCT一起纳入EES，有可能为个体行为与信仰、结构、气候和人口统计学中的宏观模式之间的关系提供源定律。
