 The extended evolutionary synthesis emphasizes how developmental events, including both the causal effects of environments on organisms (for instance, arising through developmental plasticity, or epigenetic inheritance) and the causal effects of organisms on environments (e.g.niche construction), can direct the course of evolution.Developmental plasticity, niche construction, extra-genetic forms of inheritance and developmental bias are recognized as playing evolutionary roles that cannot be reduced to natural selection of genetically encoded characters or strategies.