Workshop: Exploring the Concept of Homology in Developmental Psychology

同源是进化生物学家用来指由于共同祖先而产生的相似性的词。例如，人类的手、蝙蝠的翅膀和海豹的鳍状肢看起来截然不同，但却是同源的，因为它们都是从一个有四条腿的共同祖先的脚进化而来的。同源性的概念对生物学家有很大的帮助，因为他们致力于组织他们对跨物种生物特征的观察。就像进化生物学家一样，他们关注的是特征的起源和随后的世代变化，发展心理学家也关注个体一生中心理特征的起源和随后的变化。考虑到这两个领域的相似担忧，同源性的概念对发展心理学家和进化生物学家都应该是有用的。尽管如此，这一观点在发展心理学中还没有得到广泛的应用。目前的项目将是一个跨学科的研讨会，将把一个由进化发展生物学家、发展心理生物学家、科学哲学家和传统的儿童发展学家组成的国际小组聚集在一起，探索同源性的概念如何有助于理解心理和行为发育。从来没有一次会议专门研究同源概念在发展心理学领域的潜在效用，现在正是召开这样一次会议的时候；最近的科学进步创造了一种氛围，在这种环境中，科学家和理论家的跨学科集合将能够取得进展，从而推动这一领域的发展。研讨会将促进原本永远不会发生的互动，促进对正在讨论的概念的相互理解，并促进未来的合作。我们所有的心理和行为特征都随着我们的发展而显现，因此理解从攻击性行为、数学能力、利他主义或语言技能等各种特征需要研究这些特征的发展。整个发展心理学领域致力于理解我们每个人是如何以及为什么发展我们的适应和不适应的行为和心理状态的。不幸的是，发展心理学家仍然没有被普遍接受的连贯理论来理解这些特征是如何随着时间的推移出现和变化的。这次研讨会将采用生物学家已经卓有成效地使用的概念，并将其引入发展心理学，从而促进该领域的理论进步，这可能具有广泛的影响。具体地说，工作坊将促进发展心理学家提出新的经验性研究问题，以加强对各种心理领域中正常和异常发展的理解。由于研讨会产生和讨论的想法将在学术期刊和互联网上广泛传播，研讨会参与者取得的进展将对学术学科和专业人员以及精神健康专业人员的思考和实践产生积极影响。此外，由于我们心理特征的起源对普通公众非常感兴趣，并与公共政策的各个方面有关，如教育和我们对发育障碍的理解，这次研讨会将有助于我们对人类发展的了解，并最终也可能促进机构实践中的真正变化。

Homology is the word evolutionary biologists use to refer to similarity due to common ancestry. For example, human hands, bat wings, and the flippers of seals appear quite different, but are homologous because they all evolved from the feet of a common ancestor with four limbs. The notion of homology has been enormously helpful to biologists as they have worked to organize their observations of biological traits across species. Like evolutionary biologists, who are concerned with the origins and subsequent alterations of traits across generations, developmental psychologists are concerned with the origins and subsequent alterations of psychological traits across individuals' lifetimes. Given the similar concerns in these two fields, the idea of homology should be as useful to developmental psychologists as it has been to evolutionary biologists. Nonetheless, this idea has not been used extensively in developmental psychology. The current project will be an interdisciplinary workshop that will bring together an international group of evolutionary-developmental biologists, developmental psychobiologists, philosophers of science, and traditional child developmentalists to explore how the concept of homology might aid in understanding psychological and behavioral development. There has never been a meeting devoted to work on the potential utility of the homology concept for the field of developmental psychology, and the time is right for such a meeting; recent scientific advances have created a climate in which an interdisciplinary collection of scientist-theorists will be able to make progress that will advance this field. The workshop will foster interactions that would otherwise never occur, facilitate mutual understanding of the concepts under discussion, and promote future collaborations.All of our psychological and behavioral characteristics emerge as we develop, so understanding traits as diverse as aggressive behavior, mathematical competence, altruism, or linguistic skills requires studying the development of these traits. The entire field of developmental psychology is devoted to understanding how and why it is that each of us develops our adaptive and maladaptive behaviors and mental states. Unfortunately, developmental psychologists still have no generally accepted coherent theory for understanding how such traits emerge and change across time. This workshop will take a concept that has been productively used by biologists and import it into developmental psychology, thereby contributing to a theoretical advance in the field that is likely to have wide-ranging implications. Specifically, the workshop will facilitate developmental psychologists' formulation of novel, empirical research questions that will enhance understanding of both normal and abnormal development in a variety of psychological domains. Because the ideas generated and discussed in the workshop will be widely disseminated in a scholarly journal as well as on the internet, progress made by the workshop participants will have positive effects on the thinking and practice of students and professionals in academic disciplines as well as those in the mental health professions. Furthermore, because the origins of our psychological characteristics are of great interest to the lay public and bear on aspects of public policy such as education and our understanding of developmental disorders, this workshop will contribute to our knowledge about human development and ultimately could promote real changes in institutional practices as well.