Some Basic Assumptions of EDP
- All evolutionarily-influenced characteristics develop, and this requires examining not only the functioning of these characteristics in adults but also their ontogeny.
- All evolved characteristics develop via continuous and bidirectional gene-environment interactions that emerge dynamically over time.
- Development is constrained by genetic, environmental, and cultural factors.
- An extended childhood is needed in which to learn the complexities of human social communities and economies.
- Many aspects of childhood serve as preparations for adulthood and were selected over the course of evolution (deferred adaptations).
- Some characteristics of infants and children were selected to serve an adaptive function at specific times in development and not as preparations for adulthood (ontogenetic adaptations).
- Children show a high degree of plasticity, or flexibility, and the ability to adapt to different contexts.
Read more about this topic: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words basic and/or assumptions:
“Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation.... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)