“I discovered Esther Thelen and dynamic systems theory, and I became very irritated at the constant reiteration of the nature versus nurture paradigm. I thought, Well, this is what has to happen to the study of gender and development.”
“Can you walk me through what exactly the dynamic systems model is?”
“It has several pieces to it. First, it’s developmental. Bodies always build on what’s come before. So if you find that women and men in their 30s have a different disease pattern, you can’t just say it’s because one group is male and one group is female, you have to ask, How did that disease pattern come into being? One of the experimental tenets of dynamic systems is that you study patterns or difference as they emerge, so you start before there’s a difference and then you watch it emerge, so that you can begin to see what the components of it are. A dynamic systems approach always has to be developmental and longitudinal. A cross-sectional bit of data is just the starting point to ask where does it come from.”
“Another piece of it is that the body is always understood as being embedded in the world, and it’s a social and sensory world. You can never partition the body from the world it’s embedded in. One saying among people who do developmental systems theory is that everything is always 100 percent nature and 100 percent nurture at the same time. You can’t do the kinds of things that geneticists like to do where they say it’s 50 percent due to genes and 50 percent due to the environment—that’s a false way of looking at what the body is and how it works.”