The perspective of his account, and perhaps of the research it's
based on, seems to take a view of the 'social' as only the
present-time interactional. But developmental potential is
usually a sedimentation in epigenesis of prior phylogenetic
developments, and sociality in our phylogeny is old enough, and
caregiver-infant interaction important enough to the survival
chances of a lineage, that I would assume that infant smiles
provide triggers for caregiver responses, and so may be
phylogenetically social even before they are ontogenetically
social.
The REM smiles could be seen as providing a basis for caregiver
response 'as if' they were already 'social' (i.e. interpersonally
aware) smiles, and so also with the later smiles that do reflect
interactional responses, though perhaps still not quite in the
sense adults take them to.
I think it's useful to imagine that in any social species,
infants (and the young generally) do things 'instinctively' that
phylogenetically have been built upon so as to serve as triggers
of conspecific adults' pro-survival responses. When a baby smiles
at you, even mindlessly, it's damn hard not to feel the urge to
smile back (and perhaps do other baby-friendly deeds). I might
even imagine that all the absurd things adults do to get babies
to smile (or do what looks like a smile), is also a part of this
phylogenetic coupling across generations. Granted there are
cultural and even idiosyncratic variations on the theme, but when
adult conspecifics are a predictable part of the developing
infant's environment (social species), and share the same
phylogeny (same species), such behavioral couplings along the
epigenetic trajectory inevitably develop in evolution. So even
pre-social smiles, I think, are part of this broader sense of
sociality. And that broader sense may be worth adding to our more
usual perspectives on sociality as defined only by the conditions
of present interactional patterns.
JAY.
PS. Note that this view assumes that the unit of evolution is not
the organism at miscellaneous moments in time, but the
developmental trajectory itself. It is not organism-types that
evolve, but species-typical developmental trajectories.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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