Developmental Systems Theory - Overview

Overview

All versions of developmental systems theory espouse the view that:

• All biological processes (including both evolution and development) operate by continually assembling new structures.

• Each such structure transcends the structures from which it arose and has its own systematic characteristics, information, functions and laws.

• Conversely, each such structure is ultimately irreducible to any lower (or higher) level of structure, and can be described and explained only on its own terms.

• Furthermore, the major processes through which life as a whole operates, including evolution, heredity and the development of particular organisms, can only be accounted for by incorporating many more layers of structure and process than the conventional concepts of ‘gene’ and ‘environment’ normally allow for.

In other words, although it does not claim that all structures are equal, development systems theory is fundamentally opposed to reductionism of all kinds. In short, developmental systems theory intends to formulate a perspective which does not presume the causal (or ontological) priority of any particular entity and thereby maintains an explanatory openness on all empirical fronts. For example, there is vigorous resistance to the widespread assumptions that one can legitimately speak of genes ‘for’ specific phenotypic characters or that adaptation consists of evolution ‘shaping’ the more or less passive species, as opposed to adaptation consisting of organisms actively selecting, defining, shaping and often creating their niches.