Evolution and ontogenesis: The deontic niche of human development

Philosophy, 2021

Becoming Human is Michael Tomasello’s herculean endeavour to systematise more than two decades of research, conducted by him and his colleagues at the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The unifying frame is the shared intentionality hypothesis which, in broad outline, says that what underpins the possibility of human culture and makes us uniquely human are pervasive forms of cooperation based on pro-social motivations for helping and sharing. The emergence of cooperative motives is transformative. Great apes manifest some understanding of others in intentional terms, and self-regulate their psychological states and actions, but they do so mostly in competitive rather than cooperative contexts. Motivations to help and share allow humans to reorient capacities for individual intentionality toward the achievement of joint and collective goals. The emergence of shared intentionality has cascading effects for human psychology and is foundational for the development of linguistic communication, cultural learning, and social norms. In Becoming Human, Tomasello works out this hypothesis to a comprehensive account of the main pathways of human ontogeny, from birth to the end of the preschool period, which, according to Tomasello, is when children start to act in light of norms of rationality and morality. More than 20 years ago, when considering the problem of explaining the emergence of thought from both an evolutionary and a developmental perspective, Donald Davidson remarked: ‘what we lack is a satisfactory vocabulary for describing the intermediate steps [from non-thinking to thinking creatures]’1. In Becoming Human, philosophers will find important suggestions on how to fill in the lexical and conceptual gaps. Perhaps even more importantly, they will also find opportunities for thinking about age-old philosophical problems from the perspectives of comparative and developmental psychology. For instance, does communication, be it gestural or linguistic, hinge on capacities for reading minds or is it the other way around? Can the concept of belief be acquired absent

ID: International Dialogue, 2022

No philosophical question is older than "What are we, we humans?" Michael Tomasello contributes a splendid, empirically based answer to this hoary debate in >> Becoming Human<<, with a programmatic subtitle, >>A Theory of Ontogeny<<. We humans are an evolved organism with a capacity to create culture only by means of which we can realize aspects of our biological selves-and just as our biology can realize aspects of our cultural selves. That is, our biology evolved in ways that released in us capacities for "culture" that, in turn, released in us biologically relevant capacities, with enormous and cascading phenotypic effects - but effects not encoded directly in the genes. The term "biology" refers to hereditary regularities of human mental development that have made human culture possible (and culture in turn has made possible certain biological developments). By culture Tomasello does not mean any particular culture or tradition; he refers to the evolved biological capacity for the social construction of our living communities in ways that form the individuals socialized within them. Hence the unique ways in which human individuals are capable of cooperatively coordinating with each other, of deploying our unparalleled cognitive and social capacities. That deployment displays tremendous diversity at the level of groups, from small bands to great civilizations.

To analyse the ontogeny of sociality in any given case is to throw into question various current ideas of sociality as instinct, or as based in an innate theory of mind, or as the artefact of actor-networks, or as necessitating certain ideas of agency. This paper argues that an understanding of human autopoiesis as an historical process provides for a unified model of human being in which all the many and manifold forms of sociality can be seen to be the emergent artefact of human ontogeny.

Social Anthropology

In Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge, Bloch tells the intertwining tales of two protagonistspsychology and anthropology (Bloch 2012). With a keen eye for historical and intellectual trends, he identifies political and intellectual tensions that have hampered both fields. Arguing convincingly for abandoning the old 'theoretical apartheid' between nature and culture (in anthropology), which runs parallel to the pernicious theoretical tension between innateness and learning (in psychology), he also calls for relaxing disciplinary boundaries, maintaining that advances in the psychological sciences will enrich, rather than threaten, advances in anthropology and related social sciences. Of course, our innate endowments and capacity for experience-based learning are both essential. These twin engines of development influence one another dynamically, in ways that often go unnoticed, in a process often dubbed 'experiential canalization'. Viewed from this perspective, our earliest endowments are shaped by the cascading influences of early experience, which in turn promote certain developmental outcomes (the acquisition of specific abilities, behavioural responses or even gene responses) over others (Blair and Raver 2012; Gottlieb 1997). Research with human infants holds some of the appeal of the 'exotic' that has so often captivated the imaginations and research agendas of social scientists. But infancy work offers considerably more promise for identifying our earliest, most 'primitive' capacities and for tracing how these are shaped by experience. If we begin early enough, infancy research permits us to identify the core initial capacities that guide learning in all humans, even before the contexts in which we live begin to shape the very phenomena that we see as worthy of attention and inquiry (Medin and Bang 2014). If we consider the environment carefully enough, infancy research permits us to witness the earliest imprints of experience and to trace how experience shapes opportunities for subsequent learning. Two uniquely human featuresour altricial status at birth and our unparalleled capacity for learningcontribute jointly to our ability to acquire language and create culture. Because human infants are considerably less mature at birth than other species' young, their very survival requires prolonged proximity to caregivers. Moreover, human infants' neurological and behavioural plasticity ensures an exquisite sensitivity to early experience. This, coupled with their close interactions with elders and their own innate capacities, set the stage for the acquisition of language and transmission of culture, our species' most powerful conduits for the transmission of knowledge.

International Journal of Psychology, 2006

Ecole Normale Superieure du Cameroun, Bambili Campus, Cameroun V iews on development and intelligence mirror mainstream Euro-American ethnocentrism and are presented as being applicable to all of human diversity. In contrast, an African worldview visualizes phases of human cyclical ontogenesis of systematic socialization of responsible intelligence in participatory curricula that assign stage-appropriate developmental tasks. In these curricula, knowledge is not separated into discrete disciplines, but all strands of it are interwoven into a common tapestry, which is learned by children at different developmental stages, who participate in the cultural and economic life of the family and society. This line of thought permits the integration of diverse ethnocultural realities and disparate theoretical threads into a common conceptual system-social ontogenesis. A theory of social ontogenesis addresses how, throughout ontogeny, children are co-participants in social and cultural life. The theory anchors human development as partly determined by the social ecology in which the development occurs and by how the human being learns and develops. Its seminal concept is sociogenesis, defined as individual development that is perceived and explained as a function of social, not biological, factors. But social ontogenetic thinking does not exclude nature; it assumes that biology underpins social ontogenesis. The biological commonality that the human species shares in the genetic code plays out into a bewildering diversity of specific individuality across ecocultures. Thus, contextualist theorists stress how different ontogenetic pathways and intelligences are situated in the socio-ecological contexts and cultural systems in which children are nurtured. The empirical grounding of this theory is based on impressionistic data from the Nso people of Cameroon, with supportive evidence in other parts of Africa. The universality of social ontogenesis offers an innovative impetus to conceptualize and generate developmental knowledge that empowers. It is a learning paradigm that permits the study of human development in the context of children's engagement of cognition when they are participants in cultural communities. This can expand visions and databases beyond restrictive Eurocentric grids.

Child Development, 2000

Evolutionary developmental psychology involves the expression of evolved, epigenetic programs, as described by the developmental systems approach, over the course of ontogeny. There have been different selection pressures on organisms at different times in ontogeny, and some characteristics of infants and children were selected in evolution to serve an adaptive function at that time in their life history rather than to prepare individuals for later adulthood. Examples of such adaptive functions of immaturity are provided from infancy, play, and cognitive development. Most evolved psychological mechanisms are proposed to be domain specific in nature and have been identified for various aspects of children's cognitive and social development, most notably for the acquisition of language and for theory of mind. Differences in the quality and quantity of parental investment affect children's development and influence their subsequent reproductive and childcare strategies. Some sex differences observed in childhood, particularly as expressed during play, are seen as antecedents and preparations for adult sex differences. Because evolved mechanisms were adaptive to ancestral environments, they are not always adaptive for contemporary people, and this mismatch of evolved mechanisms with modern environments is seen in children's maladjustment to some aspects of formal schooling. We argue that an evolutionary perspective can be valuable for developing a better understanding of human ontogeny in contemporary society and that a developmental perspective is important for a better understanding of evolutionary psychology.

2023

Let’s look first, in our story of human development, at where we actually end up and how there might be many different ways to get there, now that there are 8 billion individuals on Planet Earth, drawing on the lives of people from very diverse backgrounds. Working from the end of life to the beginning. No doubt, a novel approach. It’s like reading the end of a novel first–“100 Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez (Nobel Prize, 1982), which traces 7 generations of a South American family–to understand the final outcome in the present day by re-tracing the steps that led to the amazing dénouement at the end of the novel. And there is a major organizing concept that drives all human growth and development that will inform the backbone of our story. It’s called “neoteny” or the retention of juvenile characteristics in the adult and a major feature of human evolution. That is, the slowing down of brain and bodily development through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, results in the heightened cognitive, affective, and creative abilities of human adults. And those capabilities are found nowhere else in the animal kingdom although there are glimpses of many of those abilities in other species. So our “story” starts out at the end so as to explain how these astonishing abilities in human adults (e.g., language, thought, visuospatial abilities, concept formation, theory of mind, emotional intelligence, sociality, artistic abilities, and athletic prowess) developed and evolved from a tiny zygote.

2002

List of figures page xi List of tables xiii Notes on contributors xiv Acknowledgements xxi Indigenous conceptions of childhood development and social realities in southern Africa 89 roderick fulata zimba The myth of lurking chaos 116 ernst e. boesch vii viii Contents 7 Integrating cultural, psychological and biological perspectives in understanding child development joan g. miller Part III Perspectives on development drawing from the universal and the specific 8 Between individuals and culture: individuals' evaluations of exclusion from social groups melanie killen, heidi mcglothlin and jennie lee-kim 9 Biology, culture and child rearing: the development of social motives hans-joachim kornadt Part IV Perspectives on development informed by evolutionary thinking 10 Development as the interface between biology and culture: a conceptualization of early ontogenetic experiences heidi keller 11 Integrating evolution, culture and developmental psychology: explaining caregiver-infant proximity and responsiveness in central Africa and the USA barry s. hewlett and michael e. lamb 12 Shame across cultures: the evolution, ontogeny and function of a 'moral emotion' michael j. casimir and michael schnegg Part V Metaperspectives 13 Culture and development michael cole 14 Behaviour-culture relationships and ontogenetic development ype h. poortinga and karel soudijn 15 Paradigms revisited: from incommensurability to respected complementarity lutz h. eckensberger Contents ix 16 Epilogue: conceptions of ontogenetic development; integrating and demarcating perspectives heidi keller, ype h. poortinga and axel schölmerich

Human Development, 2003

Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is described and contrasted with previous (e.g., sociobiology) and other contemporary (e.g., mainstream evolutionary psychology) approaches to applying evolutionary theory to human behavior. We argue that understanding the 'whys' of development will help us acquire a better understanding of the 'hows' and 'whats' of development, and that in addressing the 'whys' an EDP perspective has the potential to provide a fuller understanding of human ontogeny. To this end, we propose five ways of applying EDP to contemporary issues of psychological development. These include (1) classifying developmental features according to their evolutionary or functional status, (2) proposing hypotheses and microtheories to explore the function of developmental traits, (3) collecting data from different sources to test developmental evolutionary hypotheses, (4) describing the phylogenetic and sociocultural history of human developmental features and (5) designing 'evolutionary experiments'. We argue that an EDP approach should not be seen as replacing other, more proximal, explanations of development, but rather that an evolutionary perspective should be incorporated in all accounts of human ontogeny.