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Essay describing the project, its background, and method summary.

A dynamic systems approach to human development

Newspapers are awash with reports of new scientific findings—a gene for this or that complex human trait (obesity, alcoholism, homosexuality, gender differences in math and science, racial differences in IQ). And the world seems divided between people who are disposed to accept genetic explanations of human difference (both individual and group differences) and those who reject genes, biology and the existence of bodily differences in favor of social explanations. The public and all too often the scientific and intellectual discussions are framed in terms of nature (a.k.a. genes or biology or hormones) versus nurture (a.k.a. culture, environment, socialization).

My big ambition is to restructure such conversations--inside the academy, in public discourse and ultimately in the framing of social policy. Such a rearticulation seems especially urgent at a time when effective solutions to pressing problems of public policy concerning gender, race and human sexuality in the arenas of education, medicine, civil rights and economic well-being are all too often sidelined by debates about social vs biological causes. Neither those who argue that nature is the major motor of human difference nor those who would reject nature—sometimes altogether—in favor of a poorly articulated concept of nurture (a.k.a. social construction or socialization) have a good enough handle on understanding human difference. In rejecting these two extreme statements many seek a more reasonable-seeming middle ground—the so-called interactionist claim that difference is explained by biological (or as Harvard's President Lawrence Summers called them "intrinsic") average differences in temperament and talent, but that these differences interact in some manner with socialization and bias.

In practice the interactionist position is not illuminating. Research programs usually emphasize one of the interacting components to the near exclusion (except for some obligatory hand-waving) of the other. The model of human development represented by interactionism is a one of layers or shells, in which the biology forms the core source of difference that is overlain with presumably detachable layers of culture and socialization. The oft unspoken assumption is that the layers of nurture may be shed, enabling change, while the core of biology is immutable. Interactionists offer no substantive narrative of how the layers of biology and culture actually produce personalities, individual talents, social structures, particular inclinations or sexual preferences.

In place of the paradigm in which nature opposes nurture (or accepts cultural overlays), I propose a framework called a "systems approach". Systems approaches are enjoying a remarkable surge in basic biology and in some subfields of psychology. Systems thinkers consider the dynamic interactions of all the factors contributing to a particular trait of interest; these may balance one another to attain stability, or, when for some reason one or more factors alter, the dynamic balancing act can destabilize a system and lead to change. Change occurs when a system first becomes destabilized but after a time reaches some new stable state. There is a significant and exciting literature on systems biology (at the level of cells and molecules), developmental psychology (especially the development in infants of motor skills such as walking and directed reaching), and at the level of individual neurons as they connect to form neural networks. A key concept is that, rather than arriving preformed, the body acquires nervous, muscular and emotional responses as a result of a give and take with its physical, emotional and cultural experiences. To date nobody has suggested that these ideas might be applied with productive results to the study of the emergence of gender differences, gender identity, human sexuality, or racial and gender-based disparities in health outcomes. Thus the work in which I am engaged builds on a strong theoretical and practical framework of systems theory, but applies such theory in new arenas.

My method to date has been to apply systems approaches to specific examples at different levels of human organization (organ physiology, sex differences in behavior, human sexuality and gender identity) as "proofs of concept"—which I call case studies-- for a systems approach. These case studies demonstrate why such an approach is better than the nature-nurture framework and give readers practice in conceptualizing the world in this new framework. My academic targets include feminist theory scholars, psychologists who study gender and/or human sexuality, and medical researchers who study gender differences or racial differences in health outcomes. Although members of these academic groups reach a large population outside of academia, I also regularly reach out to activist groups and field practitioners who are on the lookout for better ways to think about the problems they face in their daily work. I am focusing on three different

The Emergence of Sex Difference in Early Childhood

A proof of concept addresses the emergence of sex-related differences in behavior in early childhood. Professor Cynthia Garcia-Coll (Brown University Departments of Education and Psychology and the Center for the Study of Human Development), Ms. Meaghan Lamarre and I have produced a manuscript (submitted) that argues for the importance of substituting a developmental systems approach for the nature-nurture paradigm that currently shapes research into sex differences. This collaboration began with the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women's sponsorship of a research seminar on Theories of Embodiment and has received further support from both the Pembroke Center and the Ford Foundation. We hope that publication of our position paper will open up discussion and lead ultimately to fundamentally different sorts of research projects—ones that will give us a way to understand difference that does not lock us into arguments in which a belief in nature becomes a belief in stasis and a belief in nurture a belief in change (since neither association, in my view, is correct).

I have received further support from the Ford Foundation to develop a systems approach to the study of the emergence of sex-related differences in behavior by developing one concrete research example that uses a systems approach in early childhood with the aid of a postdoctoral fellow. The fellow to be hired will have a research background in systems approaches to developmental psychology and/or the developmental dynamics of neural networks. In our proposed study, already in its early stages, Professor Cynthia Garcia Coll, Professor Ronald Seifer and I will work with the Ford-supported postdoctoral fellow to study the emergence of sex-related differences in the first year of life. The most consistent findings of sex related differences from infancy to age three are in language development, play interests and activity levels. We will use videotapes of parent-infant interactions, filmed weekly from 2-14 months; these tapes provide the raw material for initial observational studies using a longitudinal data set. (Longitudinal studies are a key component of a systems approach).

I am currently working on an initial position paper analogous to the work already produced on emerging sex differences in young children and the work on bone development. At the same time, I hope to find support for a second postdoctoral fellow who would collaborate with me in an investigation of theories of development of human sexuality and gender identity that provide a dynamic framework for thinking about the body and experience (both individual and cultural).

Brown faculty collaborators:
Ronald Seifer
Matthew Garcia