Recently I decided to split my PHD and focus on two separate area of interest, namely development and niche construction. My focus in the area of development has been on critical periods. I have published a paper (my first) on a possible way of predicting when critical periods are likely to occur in development, and have several ways I can extend this line of research. Although this work is going well and is a potential thesis topic it was never my intention to study this in my PhD. I think a PhD should be focused on things that *really* excite you and although critical periods in development are interesting that topic is not where my heart is. This is where the second topic comes in, niche construction. Evolution has always fascinated me, it asks the most fundamental and profound questions that could be asked, how did life come to be the way it is. The idea that blind natural forces, given 3.5 billion years, can create something so marvelously complex as beings that are the centre of a psychological world that is uniquely their own, highlights all that is beautiful about nature. The thing that excites me so much about evolution is that it is an unfinished story, there is so much we don’t know about it. Niche construction, I believe, is a very important process within evolution that has, until recently, been overlooked and so I have chosen to focus my attention on this process. But this poses a problem, on the one hand I have a good line of research in critical periods, and on the other, I have a research area that isn’t as well formed but is my preferred direction. What would be great is if I could marry the two research topics.
Well, I think I may have found a possible way of doing this, I was reading chapter 2 of Niche Construction by Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman, in which they give many examples of niche construction from all forms of life. What struck me was the number of examples where the niche construction behaviour didn’t directly benefit the animal performing it, but rather its offspring. There were lots of examples of nest building, chambers for nursing the young, web sacs, cocoons, burrows etc. This nicely ties the two ideas together because the niche construction behaviour affects the developmental process of the animals offspring. I can now start thinking in terms of; what affect this behaviour has on the developmental process and the evolution of development.
