Sublime

life. He found that the most important childhood risk factors predicting convictions for violent behaviour later in life were: high risk-taking, lower than average IQ (especially verbal IQ), a broken family background, harsh parental discipline, hyperactivity (such as ADHD), and large family size.

First, the babies engaged in social referencing, looking at one of the adults, four times more often, and more quickly, when an ambiguous toy was placed in front of them. That is, under uncertainty, they used cultural learning. This is precisely what an evolutionary approach predicts for when individuals should use cultural learning (see note 9). S

hunters do not produce enough calories to even feed themselves (let alone others) until around age 18 and won’t reach their peak productivity until their late thirties. Interestingly, while hunters reach their peak strength and speed in their twenties, individual hunting success does not peak until around age 40, because success depends more on kno

It also probably contains most of the children of your closer friends.

Again, there are slight differences between the sexes in the layers (women consistently tend to have more ‘5-layer’ friends than men), and both inner layers tend to increase initially with age and then decline.

Willett thinks grown-ups can be overly focused on “children as becoming,” worrying about their development and preparing them for the adult life they will one day lead. And in the process, she thinks, we can miss “children as being”—the complex society and culture they inhabit right now.

This is one of the secrets of curiosity. We don’t get allocated a fixed amount of it at birth. Instead, we inherit a mercurial quality that rises and falls through the day and throughout our lives. What’s more, its progress is deeply affected by the behavior of people around us, especially in those first months and years.

Before the groundbreaking work of Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the founders of attachment theory in the fifties and sixties, psychologists had no appreciation of the importance of the bond between parent and child.

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must