Status Updates From Making Human Beings Human: ...

Didn’t think too much of Article 15 “Two Worlds of Childhood.” The analysis seemed superficial and not particularly illuminating.

So Prum and Bronfenbrenner are both in the business of conceptualizing development: that is the concise answer to the affinity between them. Moreover I suspect that the dynamics both describe are analogous to each other. A consequence of this would be nesting spheres of causal relationships - sets of Russian dolls inside sets of Russian dolls in sets of Russian dolls. A fractal structure of recursive processes.

“ It is common practice in applying path-analytic models in developmental research to introduce as either exogenous or control variables such factors as socioeconomic status, age, family size, or even sex of child. Such procedure assumes that any developmental processes or effects under investigation are invariant across these parameters [ … ] such invariance can hardly be take. for granted.” p85.

Bronfenbrenner’s position within the Pragmatist tradition seems abundantly clear. Nevertheless I do not know of any direct connection between Bronfenbrenner and Dewey.

More interesting to me now is a kind of affinity I sense existing between Bronfenbrenner’s developmental theories and the evolutionary theories discussed in Prum’s work on sexual selection…..

Got to flesh that out!