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The End of Development

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Development does not “know” where it is going from the start…

There is no set end-state other than the end of life itself.

—Thelen and Smith (1994)

La vie est l’ensemble de fonctions qui résistent à la mort. (Life is the collection of functions that resist death.)

—Bichat (1822)

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing interest, both within theoretical biology and the philosophy of biology, in the possibility and desirability of a theory of development. Among the many issues raised within this debate, the questions of the spatial and temporal boundaries of development have received particular attention. In this article, noting that so far the discussion has mostly centered on the processes of morphogenesis and organogenesis, we argue that an important missing element in the equation, namely the development of language and cognition in general, may play an important role in settling the issue of temporal boundaries. After examining the idea that the development of language, cognition, and action are bona fide biological processes, we explore the consequences for a general theory of development of taking them into consideration.

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Notes

  1. Thus: “Die organischen Körper … zerstören sich selbst. Sie sind nicht nur steter Veränderung unterworfen, sondern ihre ganze Entwickelung ist ein Reifen zum Tode” (Organic bodies… destroy themselves. They are not only subject to a constant process of change, but their whole development is a preparation for death)(von Baer 1864, p. 39). This statement by von Baer presents some clear parallelisms with the above Bichat quote. Other eminent defenders of the process view were Joseph Woodger and Conrad Waddington (Nuño de la Rosa 2010).

  2. “Die organischen Körper sind nicht nur veränderlich, sondern die einzigen, die sich selbst verändern” (Organic bodies are not only mutable, but the only ones that change themselves) (von Baer 1864, p. 39).

  3. An anonymous reviewer notes that we appear to assume that this dual nature is exclusive of language, while this property is also observed in other phenomena like color vision, for example. We believe, however, that a strong case could be made in favor of the idea that most, if not all, developmental phenomena showing this dual nature are strongly parasitic on language development. Thus, to the extent that there are no universal perceptual categories (a debated issue), the process of constructing them is intimately connected to the act of actually naming them; in other words, the cultural aspect of language provides the necessary feedback to definitely ground perceptual categorization. For the case of color vision, see Steels and Belpaeme (2005), the references cited therein, and the open peer commentary for an overview of the issues involved.

  4. By which we mean a set of basic universal operations underlying structure building at different levels of linguistic analysis: for example, word building from morpheme merging (like + s → likes), phrase building from word merging (likes + he → he likes), phrase fronting from previously merged phrases (he likes that girl → that girl, he likes), co-indexing control of agreement (he i likes i ) or antecedence relations (that girl i , he likes e i ; e is the position left behind by the fronted phrase), and so on.

  5. That is, sets of language-specific implementations of the universal operations provided by the language capacity. In English, for example, subjects are canonically head initial (he likes, but not likes he), verbs agree with subjects only in particular “person, number” combinations (he likes, but not they likes), fronted phrases cannot antecede the empty copy they left behind at certain distances (that girl i , he likes e i , but not that girl i , he likes the idea of dating e i ), and so on.

  6. These findings leave enough elbow room to revitalize old debates concerning how mind and brain ultimately relate. They definitely do not refute functionalism, for minds arguably may be multiply realized. But such discoveries may also inspire new insights to the recent revival of mind-brain identity theory. We cannot go further into this question here; see Polger (2004) for a good exposition of the state of the art.

  7. Deciding whether the cognitive apparatus we have specified above is language-specific (as in Hauser et al. 2002) or not (as in Balari and Lorenzo 2013) is not imperative to our reasoning. If it happens to be generalizable to other cognitive capacities, the only consequence will be that it underlies the growth of them all, at the same time that the ongoing acquisition of the corresponding abilities serves to sustain its own development. Were such a scenario correct—and we think it is—capacities other than language could serve to also illustrate our point, without weakening the value that we attach to language.

  8. This objection was brought up by an anonymous reviewer.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of the Spanish Government (FFI2010-14955—SB and GL), and the Generalitat de Catalunya (Grant 2009SGR1079 to the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona—SB). We wish to thank Werner Callebaut and three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and challenging observations on an earlier version of this article. If this revised version is not worse than the previous one, it is certainly due to their stimulating observations. All remaining errors are our own.

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  1. Departament de Filologia Catalana and Centre de Lingüística Teòrica, Facultat de Lletres, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

    Sergio Balari

  2. Departamento de Filología Española, Facultad de Filología, Universidad de Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

    Guillermo Lorenzo

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  1. Sergio Balari
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Balari, S., Lorenzo, G. The End of Development. Biol Theory 10, 60–72 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-014-0180-0

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