Peter J. Marshall

I am a developmental psychologist with a background in biology. This site is home to an ongoing project: building materials that connect developmental biology, psychology, and neuroscience into a more coherent account of what it means to be a living, thinking, developing being.

Projects

About Development

The bigger picture of development, from constraints rather than causes, to developmental systems theory, life cycles and inherited resources, the deep history of multicellularity, and the evolution of brains in bodies. This picture sidesteps the nature–nurture framing to sketch out a more coherent, more interesting, and more relevant view of development.

Enacting Life

What makes living things different from nonliving things, and what follows from that for psychology and neuroscience. This is not “embodied cognition”—it is something more. Not an add-on to the study of mind and brain, but the foundation.

Human Brains

What makes the human brain unique, and how it got that way. Brain development and evolution, our extended childhood, embodiment, social complexity, and the role of language and narrative in transforming human life.