Question: do you think that your work with babies will ever not make any sense and that there will be a time where it is pointless?

Caspar Addyman answered on 23 Mar 2011:

At times it can feel like doing developmental psychology is almost impossible. We are trying to discover how the human mind develops and how we grow into people who can do these clever things like compose music, write books and design spacecraft. To try and study and understand how we do these things is very difficult and to try and do it by looking at tiny babies who just seem to roll around gurgling and giggling seems like a crazy way to approach the problem.

But that is precisely why we study babies. Adults, teenagers and children are extremely sophistcated product of years of growth and learning and thousands upon thousands of years of evolution. To understand something that complex you have to go back to it’s origins. Those origins are nature and nurture.. Geneticists and evolutionary psychologists study the nature part, developmental psychologists study the nurture part.

We are very far from having all the answers but I think we are looking in the right places.