A Developmental Systems Account of Human Nature

We argue here that to understand human nature is to understand the plastic process of human development and the diversity it produces. Drawing on the framework of developmental systems theory and the idea of developmental niche construction, we argue that human nature is not embodied in only one input to development, such as the genome, and that it should not be confined to universal or typical human characteristics. Both similarities and certain classes of differences are explained by a human developmental system that reaches well out into the ‘environment’. We point to a significant overlap between our account and the ‘life history trait cluster’ account of Grant Ramsey, and defend the developmental systems account against the accusation that trying to encompass developmental plasticity and human diversity leads to an unmanageably complex account of human nature.

Developmental Systems Theory as a Process Theory

Paul Griffiths and Russell D. Gray have argued that the fundamental unit of analysis in developmental systems theory should be a process—the life cycle—and not a set of developmental resources and interactions between those resources. The key concepts of developmental systems theory, epigenesis and developmental dynamics, also suggest a process view of the units of development. This chapter explores in greater depth the features of developmental systems theory that favour treating processes as fundamental in biology and examines the continuity between developmental systems theory and ideas about process in the work of several major figures in early twentieth-century biology, most notably C. H. Waddington.

The Power and Promise of Developmental Systems Theory

I argue that it is time for many feminists to rethink their attitudes towards evolutionary biology, not because feminists have been wrong to be deeply sceptical about many of its claims, both explicit and implicit, but because biology itself has changed. A new appreciation for the importance of development in biology has become mainstream and a new ontology, associated with developmental systems theory (DST), has been introduced over the last two decades. This turn challenges some of the features of evolutionary biology that have most troubled feminists. DST undermines the idea of biological essences and challenges both nature/nurture and nature/culture distinctions. Freed from these conceptual constraints, evolutionary biology no longer poses the problems that have justified feminist scepticism. Indeed, feminists have already found useful applications for DST and I argue that they should expand their use of DST to support more radical and wide-ranging political theories.

Feminism and rethinking our models of the self

In this article I argue that Butler and Benhabib work with models of the self that should be jettisoned. Butler relies on what I call the outside-to-inside model, while Benhabib shuttles between an outside-to-inside and an inside-to-outside model. Because of the inherent limitations of these models neither can do what both authors set out to do, which is to describe the ontogeny of the self. I trace their discussions over the course of their writings and then propose that the notion of emergence that one finds in Developmental Systems Theory offers a much better starting point for account of the nature and development of the self.