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Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution
The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory (DST) offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has excited interest from a wide range of researchers, from molecular biologists to anthropologists, because of its ability to integrate evolutionary theory and other disciplines without falling into traditional oppositions.The book provides historical background to DST, recent theoretical findings on the mechanisms of heredity, applications of the DST framework to behavioral development, implications of DST for the philosophy of biology, and critical reactions to DST.
391 pages, Paperback
First published February 19, 2001
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July 17, 2026
Lots of loopy interactive processes in evolution. Sure. Who ever claimed any different? Clearly, some traits are innate. Innate may mean experience-independent (e.g. most of the brain architecture of mice, if Verhage et al. 2000 is anything to go by, or ocular dominance columns in the eye), or experience-dependent in domain-specific ways: children instinctively learn grammar when exposed to linguistic input, but feral children don't. It's pretty wild to conclude from that that ‘innate’ doesn't mean anything, or that we should ditch the gene/environment dichotomy by looking at the whole dynamic-system elephant.
“It has been argued that genetic effects always take place in interaction with the environment, so that pure genetic influences are a fiction. This is correct, although as far as pre-wiring of the brain is concerned, the relevant environment has more to do with in utero biochemical factors than with neurally encoded experience as often assumed (see Stromswold). In fact the argument can be turned upside down. All environmental influences, all experience, before impacting on the brain in any way, must first go through genetically designed sensory pathways, which provide a first filter on experience. As soon as they are encoded by our sensory receptors, all external signals are in fact internal, and therefore subject to all the constraints imposed by our neural structure. Any change that these signals may induce on the brain (like changing the firing threshold of a synapse, stimulating dendrite or axon growth in a certain direction) is the product of molecular mechanisms that are under strict genetic control, as explained above. The effects of experience can therefore be viewed as selectively and locally altering the expression pattern of our genes, thereby modulating the execution of our genetic program. Thus there are no pure environmental influences. Instead, experience can only influence an organism through the lter of its own genome. This may be seen as a biological generalisation of the idea that not everything is learnable, an idea dear to many linguists but also important in other elds such as perceptual learning (Goldstone, 1998); instead, the genome de nes the envelope of what can be learnt, and more generally the envelope of an organisms’ possible responses to external influences.” (Ramus 2006: 257)
“It has been argued that genetic effects always take place in interaction with the environment, so that pure genetic influences are a fiction. This is correct, although as far as pre-wiring of the brain is concerned, the relevant environment has more to do with in utero biochemical factors than with neurally encoded experience as often assumed (see Stromswold). In fact the argument can be turned upside down. All environmental influences, all experience, before impacting on the brain in any way, must first go through genetically designed sensory pathways, which provide a first filter on experience. As soon as they are encoded by our sensory receptors, all external signals are in fact internal, and therefore subject to all the constraints imposed by our neural structure. Any change that these signals may induce on the brain (like changing the firing threshold of a synapse, stimulating dendrite or axon growth in a certain direction) is the product of molecular mechanisms that are under strict genetic control, as explained above. The effects of experience can therefore be viewed as selectively and locally altering the expression pattern of our genes, thereby modulating the execution of our genetic program. Thus there are no pure environmental influences. Instead, experience can only influence an organism through the lter of its own genome. This may be seen as a biological generalisation of the idea that not everything is learnable, an idea dear to many linguists but also important in other elds such as perceptual learning (Goldstone, 1998); instead, the genome de nes the envelope of what can be learnt, and more generally the envelope of an organisms’ possible responses to external influences.” (Ramus 2006: 257)
Displaying 1 of 1 review