Creatures can still penetrate the shorelines, and then onto land. A similar analogy applies to mammals. The nighttime niche might appear as an open range ecologically, but to penetrate it new technologies are required to stay active through the dark, colder hours. Peripheral niches offer a certain protection to creatures that do penetrate them, in that removed from the direct line of fitness-rich competition, low yield fitness gains have a better chance to mature as complex new novelties. In the new theory then, there are only two essential processes different from conventional theory.
Evolutionary changes form two broad categories of being either easy, or hard to enact.
The periphe ral niche and concatenation are not essential processes if all the primary effects of evolution can be explained without invoking the further mechanisms. Only an empirical study of the history of life can reveal which process were actually involved. But there is some evidence that the peripheral niche and concatenation are genuine effects, which will need further study to reveal their precise mechanisms.