Construcción de nichos temporales.Hacia una representación sinecológica de la teoría evolutiva

Laburpena

In the present research, temporary niches are defined according to the hypothesis of their biological production (Temporary Niche Construction Hypothesis). The concept of temporal niche allows us to understand the dynamics of biological communities. Temporal niches contribute evolutionarily to the coexistence, production, and maintenance of organismal diversity. Thus, the concept of temporal niche is fundamental to describe, understand and integrate phylogenetic, ontogenetic and synecological processes. To correctly use the theoretical potential of the temporal niche concept, as well as to understand the evolutionary process of its construction, I suggest it is necessary to attend to the functional (symbiotic) and temporal (phenological) relationships that are actualized and converge at the level of biological communities (synecology). For this purpose, the "standard representation" of evolution is insufficient and can lead to errors in the substantiation of the most relevant processes. It must therefore be replaced by a broader representation. I will call this new evolutionary representation "Synecological Representation". I argue that to consolidate the synecological representation it is necessary to revise fundamental philosophical concepts in biology such as continuity, persistence, causality, identity, and biological similarity considering the most relevant theoretical contributions of evolutionary biology after the New Synthesis. The result is an evolutionary representation that focuses on the processes of cooperation, coordination and synchronization deployed by biological communities. From this more holistic and global perspective, organisms structure their ecological and evolutionary dynamics through the construction of their synecological environments, modifying not only physicochemical relationships, as fundamentally happens in the traditional framework of the theory of niche construction (TNC); but, above all, modifying symbiotic and phenological relationships. In short, the proposal developed here describes a broader evolutionary dynamic than is usually considered, with three fundamental attributes: synecological, symbiotic and phenological.