  In principle, the existence of this sort of ‘niche construction’ can be accepted by all parties to the nativism controversy. That is, both Tomasello and Chomsky could agree that dispositions to construct ‘linguistic niches’ — environments in which languages are easy for human offspring to learn — may have been selected for in our species. Nevertheless, the notion of niche construction militates against the nativist, particularly when one takes into account the related notion of ‘cumulative downstream niche construction.’