#  Constructing the social world: from home remodeling to a new social order 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 13, 2017** 

 04:00PM - 04:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Haller Hall, Room 102, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138**  



 

 



 

**[Mark Laidre](http://marklaidre.weebly.com/),** Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College.Of any animal species, *Homo sapiens* makes perhaps the most radical changes to its surrounding environment. This powerful capacity for ‘niche construction’ is intimately linked to a suite of seemingly unique adaptations, including strong reliance on social learning, habitual tool use, sophisticated communication, and high levels of cooperation among non-kin. In this talk I focus on a phylogenetically distant species, a humble invertebrate, which has independently converged on a parallel suite of analogous, human-like adaptations. Through long-term field and laboratory experiments, spanning a decade, I reveal how and why a seemingly trivial act of niche construction, remodeling homes, has sparked the creation of a new social order among these invertebrates. I conclude with recent work on the evolution of gossip, a form of social niche construction that is unique to humans.



 

 



 

 

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