Biological Maturation, Reaction Paper Example

Discuss the role of the following as causes of development, and state your views about their relative importance:

• Heredity
• Biological maturation
• Psychological change
• Environmental forces.

All four factors interact with each other and will have some impact on an individual’s development.

Heredity is an important factor in an individual’s development, but I believe it is more relevant to consider one’s actual genes. An individual’s genes will, for the most part, be a combination of an individual’s parents, hence the heredity factor. Yet, in many cases, there are small genetic variations that could produce major differences in outcome, such as out of the ordinary artistic, mathematical, scientific or athletic abilities (e.g. Mozart, Einstein or Michael Phelps). That being said, children of gifted athletes or mathematicians seem to have, on average, higher capabilities in these areas than the average child.

Biological maturation is also a key factor, but again applies to “averages” and is dependent on chronological age. Children learn to walk at about 12 months, but will not be able to run an eight-minute mile for many years after that. Everything usually happens in a pre-determined sequence, with some natural variability. One interesting example has to do with language acquisition. For most children, the optimum time to acquire a new language is before the age of 6 or 7. There is clearly a measure of interaction with environmental forces: not every child is exposed to more than one language. Yet, the later an individual learns a new language, the worse the accent, despite the fact that some measure of fluency might be attained. Interestingly enough, this window to becoming completely multilingual matches Piagets’s preoperational stage, as described in Santrock (2011).

From a slightly different perspective, psychological change is also very important, but in my view closely connected to biological maturation, i.e. connected to life-span theories. A 3 year-old’s perception of right and wrong is very different than a 7-year-old, and again different than a teenager. Yet, it is crucial to understand and monitor these differences so that the individual can grow up to be a contributing member of society.

Environmental forces also represent a key factor in an individual’s development. Having a bad math or English teacher might turn a child off from being able, or even wanting to excel at math or writing. Similarly, a child growing up in poverty during the great depression will probably turn into a thrifty adult, probably afraid to borrow money if his parents’ house was repossessed. Yet, with the right kind of remediation, things can get turned around.

Reaction

Personally, I do not believe that any one of the four factors discussed above is much more important than another. I think that everyone, given the right environment and growing-up conditions, can achieve a certain level of proficiency, for example in academics or athletics. Yet, only with the appropriate genetic makeup, usually determined by heredity, will an individual be able to achieve superior skills.

Perhaps, a weighted decision tree is in order to illustrate the point. Let us take an individual who has all of the genetic potential to be a great scientist and live with all of the amenities of civil society his or her entire life. The weighted decision tree below illustrates that given the relative contribution (Decimals in the figure are arbitrarily weighted) on each area of influence on her development and optimal developmental bias (scored as 1 in terminal nodes of the tree) she would achieve an optimal probability of becoming an accomplished academic (resulting as 1 in the initial node of the tree).

Now, let us take the exact same person, and say she live as a feral child until the age of 8, but was rescued by philanthropist and given a life with all of the amenities of civil society. She has significantly reduced probability of becoming an accomplished academic.

Let us consider another person. She was born with a genetically abnormal brain. Here, decision tree follows given the impact on developmental and psychosocial conditions and optimizing environmental conditions.

We see that the probability that she will achieve academic notoriety is drastically reduced. My point is that if we could assign ballpark figures to what appears to be the relative impact of each area of contribution and a method to score for the relative weight of each, we could approximate the probability of the outcome.