ABSTRACT
Introduction.............................................................................................................. 17 2.1 Preformation and Epigenesis ......................................................................... 17 2.2 Development as Explanation ......................................................................... 19 2.3 A Currently Acceptable Developmental Neurobehavioral
Genetics: Interim Solution ............................................................................. 24 2.4 Summary and Conclusions ............................................................................ 26 Acknowledgments.................................................................................................... 26 References................................................................................................................ 26
From the very dawn of human history, there must have been people who wondered how we come to be-not just in the grand religious sense that ancient texts like the Hebrew bible attempt to answer, but also in the more mundane and practical sense of wondering about the mechanisms involved in human (and all animal) development from egg and sperm to full-grown adult. By the time of Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E., there were two main schools of thought on how we become. In fact, the proper scientific name for the study of individual development was derived from the Greek language: ontogeny.
