Abandoning the ‘theoretical apartheid’ between nature and nurture: human infants hold the key

In Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge, Bloch tells the intertwining tales of two protagonists – psychology and anthropology (Bloch 2012). With a keen eye for historical and intellectual trends, he identifies political and intellectual tensions that have hampered both fields. Arguing convincingly for abandoning the old ‘theoretical apartheid’ between nature and culture (in anthropology), which runs parallel to the pernicious theoretical tension between innateness and learning (in psychology), he also calls for relaxing disciplinary boundaries, maintaining that advances in the psychological sciences will enrich, rather than threaten, advances in anthropology and related social sciences. Of course, our innate endowments and capacity for experience-based learning are both essential. These twin engines of development influence one another dynamically, in ways that often go unnoticed, in a process often dubbed ‘experiential canalization’. Viewed from this perspective, our earliest endowments are shaped by the cascading influences of early experience, which in turn promote certain developmental outcomes (the acquisition of specific abilities, behavioural responses or even gene responses) over others (Blair and Raver 2012; Gottlieb 1997). Research with human infants holds some of the appeal of the ‘exotic’ that has so often captivated the imaginations and research agendas of social scientists. But infancy work offers considerably more promise for identifying our earliest, most ‘primitive’ capacities and for tracing how these are shaped by experience. If we begin early enough, infancy research permits us to identify the core initial capacities that guide learning in all humans, even before the contexts in which we live begin to shape the very phenomena that we see as worthy of attention and inquiry (Medin and Bang 2014). If we consider the environment carefully enough, infancy research permits us to witness the earliest imprints of experience and to trace how experience shapes opportunities for subsequent learning. Two uniquely human features – our altricial status at birth and our unparalleled capacity for learning – contribute jointly to our ability to acquire language and create culture. Because human infants are considerably less mature at birth than other species’ young, their very survival requires prolonged proximity to caregivers. Moreover, human infants’ neurological and behavioural plasticity ensures an exquisite sensitivity to early experience. This, coupled with their close interactions with elders and their own innate capacities, set the stage for the acquisition of language and transmission of culture, our species’ most powerful conduits for the transmission of knowledge.