NCT and culture‐conscious developmental science

This is a commentary on Flynn et al. (2012). We share the belief that there is great potential for developmental science in bringing the ideas of Niche Construction Theory (NCT), as developed in evolutionary biology, into conversation with Vygotskian-inspired theories such as cultural-historical and activity theories, distributed cognition, and embodied cognition, although from our vantage point the latter differ in substantive ways that may be differently generative. On the evidence of this paper, NCT and culture-inclusive developmental science share a number of assumptions including: 1 Culture is a central factor in human development. 2 Children are active agents of their own development; however, agency is severely constrained given the cultural / cognitive / ecological niches into which they are born. 3 Human ontogeny emerges from processes taking place simultaneously across three developmental histories operating on different temporal scales. Following Vygotsky, we refer to them as phylogenetic, cultural-historical, and ontogenetic histories (Wertsch, 1985). 4 These three developmental histories are part of a single process of species evolution; changes at one level are contingent upon, and feed back upon, processes at other levels. At each developmental history, or time scale, the process of change must be seen as involving a 'triple helix'. 5 Each developmental history manifests a different principle of change. Phylogenetic change is Darwinian while cultural-historical change is Lamarckian. Ontogeny is a hybrid of the two processes of change and their associated time scales. Despite these similarities, we detect tensions in how 'culture' is conceptualized. In our view, this fundamental concept is not reducible to tools, engineering, practices, symbolic representations, information about appropriate behaviors, or other means. Rather, culture is best conceived of as a medium that mediates the relationship between phylogeny and ontogeny, shaping the goals as well as the means of human activity. This view requires that we interpret culture as more than an added layer of complexity which, along with neural plasticity, 'lends human niche construction a special potency'. To advance interdisciplinary collaboration around the concept of culture as a medium and not just a means of human development, we explore several implications of accepting the idea that ontogeny emerges from the simultaneous influence of life processes operating on different time scales, and according to different principles of change. We have chosen as an example the developmental mechanism called prolepsis: a caregiver's use of an imagined future for an infant to shape the present experiences of the …