ABSTRACT
Developmental scientists increasingly agree that children’s psychological development and learning should be considered in their evolutionary and cultural context. In this chapter we suggest an evolutionary perspective that focuses on three key aspects: the centrality of generational reproduction; the ways organisms extend into an environment that often they have constructed; and the constitutive character of ontogenesis. We emphasize the fact that the varied niches into which children are born are highly structured social worlds—institutional realities—which underpin the interactions in which children are involved by defining future-binding obligations. This aspect of human community life appears to have begun with hunter-gatherers, for whom kinship was the first institution: it included not simply family connections but a way of relating to the cosmos. Kinship made possible a specifically human mode of reproduction which continues, in a modified form, to the present day. In this mode, ontogenesis is marked by its long duration, plasticity, and communal character. Today, as in the distant past, it is crucial that children learn about the institutional reality into which they are born as an essential concomitant of the process of acquiring culturally essential skills and knowledge. Learning is achieved in many contexts, both historically and synchronically, but today the learning that is dominant in the lives of most of the world’s children has been institutionalized. Becoming literate in school is a particularly clear example of the three components of evolution, and of the interweaving of ontogenesis, societal change, and evolutionary change.
