Abstract
Any attempt to construct an evolutionary view of infant intelligence should raise a certain skepticism in the reader’s mind. What, after all, is the nature of intelligence in infancy? And how shall the validity of an evolutionary account be judged? Not, certainly, by its predictive power for the future evolution of infant behavior! On the first question I shall defer largely to Piaget (1952), whose descriptions and explanations of infant intelligence I find consistent with an evolutionary view. On the second question, a few words about evolutionary theory may be helpful.
Since selection can and did occur in terms of developments at all ontogenetic points, the entire life span is a product of evolutionary adaptation, and a psychologist interested in causes of behavior must simultaneously consider phylogeny and ontogeny, difficult as it may seem. [Freedman, 1967, p. 489]
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Scarr-Salapatek, S. (1976). An Evolutionary Perspective on Infant Intelligence: Species Patterns and Individual Variations. In: Lewis, M. (eds) Origins of Intelligence. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-6961-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-6961-5_6
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