Kids’ soccer in 30 minutes, but some early Saturday morning reading before that begins. This is from the introduction of Mel Konner’s voluminous (and excellent) 2010 volume, The Evolution of Childhood:
6. Human behavior and its development, including all of mental life, are in their entirety biological manifestations. This does not mean that they are not plastic or culturally influenced, but that all such effects must be understood as plasticity of and influence on biological materials (West-Eberhard 1989, 2003, 2005). Plasticity is limited by boundary conditions, the resistance of biological materials to change, and processes known to evolutionists as reaction norms and facultative adaptations, which channel change along particular, limiting pathways.
10. Despite limits to plasticity, cultural influence on human development is strong because its power is biologically assured (Lumsden and Wilson 1981; Durham 1991; Shore 1996). The same state-of-the-art personal computer on the desk of an architect, a Bible scholar, a mathematician, and a football-obsessed twelve-year-old has unvarying hardware but varied output. In the brain even the hardware is plastic, the software all the more so. To solve the apparent paradox of the powers of biology and culture is a central task of developmental research.
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1. Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, 2010. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9780674045668
