  Some recent work focuses on the capacities of organisms to modify their environments in ways that affect the selection pressures that they face. In classical models of organism-environment interactions, organisms adapted to their environments by “fiting” into pre-existing niches. Richard Lewontin’s dialectical model of organism-environment interactions emphasized the extent to which organisms “construct” niches rather than merely accommodating themselves to those already present in the environment (Lewontin 1982). There is now a large body of literature on niche construction (see inter alia Laland et al 2000 and Odling-Smee et al 2003) The application of this idea to issues in evolutionary epistemology takes the form of appeals to cultural niches and cognitive niches. Cultural niches are created by the capacity of organisms, in general, to the extent that having culture can be attributed to them, and human beings, in particular, to learn from one another and from the constructed cultural modifications of their environments. For human beings, such constructions take the forms of, among others, language, educational institutions, communication systems and other forms of information manipulation and transfer. Cognitive niches are created by the capacities for constructing mental models of the environment that, in turn, enable organisms, especially human beings, during the course of their lifetimes to systematically and efficiently exploit the resources of their environments (Pinter 2003, 2010; Whiten and Erdal 2012, Whiten and van Schaik 2007, Laland and O’Brien 2011)