This discussion critiques an evolutionary model of human development, highlighting its flaws and implications for understanding behavior.
The Affordance Management Framework reduces the complexity of development to strategies for accomplishing reproduction-related goals. Even for an evolutionary model, this is rather odd. At every life stage, the proximal rather than distal function of goal-related behaviors is to accomplish gene transportation, without a mediating psychological rationale. I illustrate these problems with recent research findings on the developmental struggles of emerging adults.
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Paul Siegel (2026) studied this question.
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