Preface
I began writing About Development in 2020 for an upper-level undergraduate course at Temple University, where I am a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. I have revised the readings over time as my teaching and thinking have developed, and am making them freely available as an Open Educational Resource.
The readings grew out of a question that runs through my teaching and research: how does development come about? We know a great deal about what happens as organisms develop. Explaining how those changes occur raises further questions. How does a new life produce an organized living being when the finished organism is not already present at the beginning? How can development be so reliable while also producing differences among individuals?
These questions take us beyond psychology into biology and the history of ideas about development. They also bear on how we understand brains. A brain develops as part of a living body, and the organization of that body is itself something we need to explain.