Foreword

Introduction to special issue on The Embodied Mind and the Baldwin Effect.

In early November 1999, a week long, interdisciplinary conference convened at Bennington College in Vermont to discuss the integration of the evolutionary origins of mind and brain with emerging principles of developmental and evolutionary biology. A group of scholars from biochemistry, psychology, philosophy, developmental biology, and cognitive science discussed how the interaction of contingency, natural selection, and self-organization might lead to the open-ended biological order on which development depends. To this discussion, several participants brought their current ideas about the contours of an evolutionary synthesis that robustly integrates developmental biology, psychology, molecular and population genetics. Others brought approaches related to fundamental problems of brain and mind development, from movement to language, including issues of meaning.