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A concept widely adopted from contemporary evolutionary theory. The early approach to evolutionary creativity was that living beings adapted to fixed outside circumstances – and those that adapted best survived. And that life spread and diversified via the discovery and adaptation to ever more and more environmental “niches” (unique environmental spaces/conditions). Survival was premised on the creative changes (either via adaptation or exaptation) of the creature alone. This approach can be summarized as a “problem posing – problem solving” methodology – the environment poses a problem and the creature’s self-transformation “solves” it (a very common framework in Creativity as well).
More recent developments in Evolutionary theory have challenged this paradigm. Creatures do not simply change themselves to meet a niche – they change the niche, and in turn this niche transforms them. Beavers are exemplary in this regard – by building dams they make a novel aquatic environment that suits themselves, and as they do this environment has changed them (in a mutualistic dance of co-evolution with countless other species including the trees they are eating and building with). This is a creative practice of worldmaking where worlds are not given but creatively made (ontogenesis). And it is a creative process of “problematization” – the invention of a novel question, approach, and conditions.
Niche construction is where a creature shapes its environment and the environment then turns around and fundamentally shapes the creature.
See: Aptation, and:
See also: Worldmaking, worlding, emergence, individuation
