136 INTELLIGENT DEVELOPMENT
do the best for their children: how to help the plans “unfold” and blos-
som, provide the right environment, ensure the appropriate nourish-
ment, equip the nursery, get the right baby books and toys, and perhaps
even save for private school or some educational coaching.
Sometimes, too, parents think of child rearing as a bit like cooking:
they cannot do anything about the basic ingredients, but those ingredi-
ents can be enhanced with the right skills in the kitchen/development
area. In this chapter, I show how development is not a predetermined
unfolding or assembly line, or “cooking” from a DNA recipe. It is a hugely
adaptable set of pro cesses that actively constructs potential and variation
rather than merely expressing it— and that, in complex changeable envi-
ronments, it could be no other way.
DEVELOPMENT IN CHANGING ENVIRONMENTSScholarly thinking about development has been undergoing something
of a slow revolution over the past few de cades. It took a major step for-
ward when it was realized in the 1990s that, rather than being predeter-
mined, the dynamics of the developing system itself plays a crucial role
in the creation of complex form and variation.^2 At fi rst, these advances
were largely conceptual. But research since has increasingly supported
them. Discoveries of real developmental pro cesses have raised impor tant
questions about the origins and nature of potential, the origins and na-
ture of variation, and the nature of the environment that supports and
promotes development.
Development cannot be an assembly line, obeying a fi xed plan in the
genes, for the reasons outlined in chapter 4. As living things evolved in
increasingly changeable environments, the “plan” had to be one that is
subject to constant revision during the individual’s life. Quite diff er ent
systems of revision have emerged in the evolution from single cells to
human social cognition, as organisms have faced and survived more
unpredictable environments.
We have seen in chapter 4 how single cells can learn and adapt. But
development as we now think of it really started when cells aggregated
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