Friends, Neighbors, and Boundaries

I’ll forgo the usual primer on Developmental Systems Theory (DST) for this little intervention: as a perspective, however, it will be holographically present, and some of its features will be made explicit along the way. Instead, I’ll just sketch some problems I’ve been thinking about, all of which circle around the theme of boundaries in organism-environment systems. For reasons that will become evident, in addressing the developmental systems framework I speak only for myself. The friends and neighbors of my title are obviously theoretical ones. They are so not so much different groups—the categories certainly overlap—as they are different aspects of our collegial relationships. Friends should be understood as enemies of my enemy, those with whom we make common cause. They are by our side at some scholarly barricade or other, perhaps engaging in the critiques of biological or social determinism that were part of my own academic development, or more recently of a variety of genecentrisms, adaptationism, representationalism, or the dominant strains of evolutionary psychology. 1 Such friends and allies tend to encounter each other on panels, in edited volumes, at workshops; on the page they often line up in the same citation-laden parentheses. The question of neighbors arises afterward, on the way home from the barricades, perhaps, when a united front is no longer necessary and you gaze at