Evolutionary Perspectives on Child Development and Education

?This volume will be of particular value not only for the field of evolutionary psychology in general but also for the sub-disciplines of evolutionary educational psychology and evolutionary developmental psychology. It will achieve this objective by constituting the first collection of scholarly chapters devoted specifically to examining how adopting an evolutionary perspective on education and child development can advance both theory and practice in these domains. Although several single- or dual-authored books published more than seven years ago (described below) have treated various features associated with some of the topics to be covered in the proposed volume, none of those books focused exclusively on the pedagogical and schooling implications of adopting an evolutionary perspective on education and child development. Finally, it should be noted that the potential interest of this volume to an even broader audience of educational researchers is corroborated by the funding of a grant from the American Educational Research Association’s highly competitive Research Conferences Program for a meeting in Washington, D.C. in November of 2013 on which the proposed volume is based. This award was made to the Evolution Institute (President: David Sloan Wilson, Ph.D.), a nonprofit think tank whose mission is to use evolutionary science for solving real-world problems. Furthermore, that conference was organized by the co-editors of the proposed volume, who also serve on the Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board Education Subcommittee.?

David C. Geary, Ph.D., Co-Organizer is Curators’ Professor and a Thomas Jefferson Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri. Among other honors, he was invited to serve on the U. S. Department of Education’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel, and was appointed by President Bush to serve on the Institute of Education Sciences National Board for Education Sciences. He has published more than 200 articles and chapters across a wide range of topics, including cognitive, developmental, and evolutionary psychology, education, and medicine, including three sole-authored books, Children's mathematical development (1994), Male, female: The evolution of human sex differences (1998, now in second edition. 2010), and The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general intelligence (2005), and one co-authored book, Sex differences: Summarizing more than a century of scientific research (Ellis et al., 2008). He has given invited addresses to a variety of departments (anthropology, biology, behavior genetics, computer science, education, government, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and psychology) and Universities throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Europe and East Asia.