Expanding the modern synthesis II: Formal perspectives on the inherent role of niche construction in fitness

Abstract

Expanding the modern synthesis requires elevating the role of interaction within and across various biological scales to the status of an evolutionary principle. One way to do this is to characterize genes, gene expression, and embedding environment as information sources linked by crosstalk, constrained by the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory (Wallace, 2010a). This produces an inherently interactive structure that escapes the straightjacket of mathematical population genetics or other replicator dynamics. Here, we examine fitness from that larger perspective, finding it intimately intertwined with niche construction. Two complementary models are explored: niche construction as mediating the connection between environmental signals and gene expression, and as a means of tuning the channel for the transmission of genetic information in a noisy environment. These are different views of the same elephant, in a sense, seen as simplified projections down from a larger dynamic system.