Peter J. Marshall

About Development
I wrote these documents to help students and other readers understand development from multiple angles - from the big picture of how life cycles have evolved to the details of how individual organisms develop and change. My goal was to explore fundamental questions about what development means by connecting ideas across biology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy.
Enacting Life
This resource emerged from my interest in what makes living things fundamentally different from non-living things. These materials examine this question through the lens of embodiment, and more specifically an enactivist line of thinking. Psychology students rarely encounter these fundamental ideas about the nature of living things, even though they offer profound insights into cognition, development, and the relation between individual and environment.
Human Brains
These learning materials discuss how humans came to occupy such a distinctive place in life on earth, looking beyond simple biological explanations to examine the complex relationships between development, learning, and culture. The documents explore how human abilities emerged through the interplay between our extended childhood, our capacity to learn from others, and our drive to share and improve knowledge across generations.