I am honored and thrilled to receive the G. Stanley Hall Award for contributions to developmental psychology. Hall was an early proponent of the integration of evolutionary theory and developmental psychology, although the field in general has not matured in this direction. In Hall’s time, the understanding of evolution and environmental influences on development was not well developed, but much has changed since then. The basic idea has the potential to broaden our understanding of human development, putting people in evolutionary, historical, and cultural context. These are sometimes seen as competing explanations for the development of at least some traits, but they need not be.
The framing of development in terms of evolutionary, historical, and cultural influences can be illustrated by some of our work on children’s mathematical development (Geary, 1994, 1995). Mathematical competencies are clearly an important component of children’s education in developed nations and will influence their later employability, wages, and opportunities for career advancement (Bynner, 1997). Historically, the returns to education (e.g., wages, social capital) vary across generations and are now higher than they were just a few generations ago (Hout, 2012).
We showed both cultural and historical influences on the development of basic mathematical competencies by comparing several generations of children and adults from the U.S. and China (Geary, Bow-Thomas, Liu, and Siegler, 1996; Geary et al., 1997; Geary, Salthouse, Chen, and Fan, 1996). Within the U.S., there has been a cross-generational decline in basic skills (e.g., fluency in arithmetic) and a cross-generational increase in China. The well-documented advantage of Chinese students in basic mathematics did not exist in earlier generations, most likely due (in part) to historical changes in the educational foci of these two nations. We have also shown that educational outcomes in reading as well as broader social mores can influence boys’ and girls’ preparation for college (Stoet & Geary, 2020), and that broad levels of economic and social development are related to academic development and later occupational choices (Stoet and Geary, 2018).
If we step back even more and broadly consider mathematical competencies, we see that these are not universal nor is formal schooling. Children in traditional cultures acquire language, various social-cognitive competencies (e.g., processing facial features and expressions), spatial abilities, and an intuitive understanding of how objects can be used as tools, among other abilities. All of these emerge during development without formal education or even much informal education from their parents. Children in these contexts do not, however, learn how to read, write, or do mathematics.
This is why I have made a distinction between universal abilities, such as language and theory of mind, and historically and culturally-specific ones, such as reading and mathematics (Geary, 1994, 1995). To make the distinction clear, I call the former biologically primary abilities and the latter biologically secondary abilities, although much remains to be learned regarding how educational interventions build secondary abilities from their primary base (Geary and Berch, 2016). Whatever the underlying mechanisms (Geary, 2007), the distinction makes it clear that universal education is a massive social intervention that, when effective, can substantively change the lives of children. The gist is that some aspects of children’s cognitive development are, from an evolutionary perspective, highly dependent on social interventions and wider cultural factors, whereas other aspects emerge through a combination of inherent biases and engagement in species-typical activities, such as social play (Geary and Bjorklund, 2000).
In recent years, I’ve become interested in using an evolutionary perspective to better understand sex- and trait-specific sensitivities to social and environmental stressors (Geary, 2015, 2017, 2019). I cannot go into the details here, but this perspective can be used to identify traits that should be more sensitive in one sex or the other. In an animal model, we showed that prenatal exposure to the toxin Bisphenol A had sex- and species-specific effects on spatial abilities and exploratory behaviors that only make sense in terms of the evolutionary history of these species (Jašarević et al., 2011; Williams et al., 2013). We’ve recently extended this approach to people and found that binge drinking—another form of toxin exposure—can result in sex-specific cognitive deficits in men (spatial deficits) and women (face processing deficits; Hone, Scofield, Bartholow, Geary, 2020). The approach also highlights developmental periods, such as adolescence, in which some of these sex-specific vulnerabilities are heightened (Geary, 2015).
In all, an evolutionary perspective allows us to zoom out and more clearly see the importance of culture and experience on many aspects of children’s development, especially for secondary abilities, and to more fully appreciate the sources of cultural and historical differences in these aspects of development. An evolutionary approach also allows us to zoom in on specific traits, ages, and across the sexes to identify variation in sensitivity to chronic social and other (e.g., toxin exposure) stressors.
References
Bynner, J. M. (1997). Basic skills in adolescents' occupational preparation. The Career Development Quarterly, 45, 305-321.
Geary, D. C. (1994). Children's mathematical development: Research and practical applications. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Korean translation (2012). Seoul, S. Korea: Hakjisa Publisher. Translators Shin, H.K., Lee, B.H., Lee, T.S.
Geary, D. C. (1995). Reflections of evolution and culture in children's cognition: Implications for mathematical development and instruction. American Psychologist, 50, 24-37.
Geary, D. C. (2007). Educating the evolved mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology. In J. S. Carlson and J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating the evolved mind (pp. 1-99, 177-202, Vol. 2, Psychological perspectives on contemporary educational issues). Greenwich, Connecticut: Information Age.
Geary, D. C. (2015). Evolution of vulnerability: Implications for sex differences in health and development. San Diego, California: Elsevier Academic Press.
Geary, D. C. (2016). Evolution of sex differences in trait- and age-specific vulnerabilities. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 855-876.
Geary, D. C. (2019). Evolutionary perspective on sex differences in the expression of neurological diseases. Progress in Neurobiology, 176, 33-53.
Geary, D. C., and Berch, D. B. (Eds.) (2016). Evolutionary perspectives on child development and education. New York: Springer.
Geary, D. C., and Bjorklund, D. F. (2000). Evolutionary developmental psychology. Child Development, 71, 57-65.
Geary, D. C., Bow-Thomas, C. C., Liu, F., and Siegler, R. S. (1996). Development of arithmetical competencies in Chinese and American children: Influence of age, language, and schooling. Child Development, 67, 2022-2044.
Geary, D. C., Hamson, C. O., Chen, G. P., Liu, F., Hoard, M. K., and Salthouse, T. A. (1997). Computational and reasoning abilities in arithmetic: Cross-generational change in China and the United States. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4, 425-430.
Geary, D. C., Salthouse, T. A., Chen, G. P., and Fan, L. (1996). Are East Asian versus American differences in arithmetical ability a recent phenomenon? Developmental Psychology, 32, 254-262. Digested in: Science, 271, 296.
Hone, L. S. E., Scofield, J. E., Bartholow, B. D., Geary, D. C. (2020). Frequency of recent binge drinking is associated with sex-specific cognitive deficits: Evidence for condition-dependent trait expression in humans. Evolutionary Psychology, 18, 1-13
Hout, M. (2012). Social and economic returns to college education in the United States. Annual Review of Sociology, 38, 379-400.
Jašarević, E., Sieli, P. T., Twellman, E. E., Welsh, T. H. Jr, Schachtman, T. R., Roberts, R. M., Geary, D. C., and Rosenfeld, C. S. (2011). Disruption of adult expression of sexually selected traits by early exposure to Bisphenol A. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 11715-11720. (Co-senior author)
Stoet, G., and Geary, D. C. (2020). Gender differences in the pathways to higher education. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117, 14073–14076.
Stoet, G., and Geary, D. C. (2018). The gender-equality paradox in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. Psychological Science, 29, 581-593. [Altmetric Top 100, 2018]
Williams, S.A., Jašarević, E., Vandas, G. M., Warzak, D. A., Geary, D. C., Ellersieck, M. R., Roberts, R. M., and Rosenfeld, C. S. (2013). Effects of developmental Bisphenol A exposure on reproductive-related behaviors in California mice (Peromyscus californicus): A monogamous animal model. PloS ONE, 8(2) : e55698.