An inter­est­ing follow-up if you enjoyed read­ing about the devel­op­ment of the infant brain last week: Seed Mag­a­zine inter­views Ali­son Gop­nik, ask­ing about her research and “why every­thing we think we know about babies is wrong”.

Seed: You describe chil­dren as being “use­less on pur­pose.” What do you mean by that?

AG: It’s related to one of the basic things that came out of our research: Why do chil­dren exist at all? It doesn’t make tremen­dous evo­lu­tion­ary sense to have these crea­tures that can’t even keep them­selves alive and require an enor­mous invest­ment of time on the part of adults. That period of depen­dence is longer for us than it is for any other species, and his­tor­i­cally that period has become longer and longer.

The evo­lu­tion­ary answer seems to be that there is a trade­off between the abil­ity to learn and imag­ine — which is our great evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tage as a species — and our abil­ity to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use.

The arti­cle also men­tions how Gop­nik believes “Freud’s and Piaget’s con­cep­tions of young children’s the­ory of mind are wrong”. A recent (cor­rel­a­tive) study has shown that she may be cor­rect.