Phylogeny and Montessori Developmental Theory

Montessori developmental theory treats scientifically the developmental process of the first twenty-four years of human life, from age zero to twenty-four, including the prenatal period. The theory was established and handed down through the scientific observation and insight of Maria Montessori, a physician and anthropologist, and her collaborators. Montessori educational theory is the application of that developmental theory to the design of the environments in which humans grow.

Why we need to understand “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”

In Montessori educational theory as commonly practiced, little weight is given to “recapitulating phylogeny,” the developmental principle shared by all living things. Instead of such physical principles, more immediately useful material is emphasized: case studies of individual children, for example, drawn from the rules of thumb that teachers and mothers have built up over many years.

The developmental theory we research is based on Montessori developmental theory, and the reason is that Montessori developmental theory alone adopts, as the core of its theory, the embryologist Haeckel’s recapitulation theory: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

We believe that the essence of developmental theory cannot be understood without understanding this biogenetic principle. Conversely, once this essence is deeply understood, a path opens up for developing Montessori developmental theory, a “human-centered developmental theory” organized around one particular species (the animal whose scientific name is given as Homo sapiens or Homo sapiens sapiens), into a more general “developmental theory of living things as a whole.” Supernatural Growth Theory was built to reflect this distinctive direction of Polymath Research. Its content has not yet been published in full, but reading the article linked above should give a sense of what it aims for.

Why developmental theory matters for working with natural intelligence

The more powerful the technologies of civilization that enrich our daily lives, the more firmly they rest on some physical theory. It is inconceivable, for example, that the engineers at OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT, or at DeepMind, which develops AlphaFold, would not be well versed in the theories underlying their technologies. As computing technology grows more complex and sophisticated, it becomes almost impossible to contribute to progress in computer science without knowing basic principles such as information theory and the theory of computation.

In the world of artificial intelligence, the object of study is an artifact, so no progress at all can be made without grounding in physical theory. Among those working at the cutting edge, it is taken for granted that anyone who hopes to achieve results there will need “a breakthrough at the level of physics.” AI researchers and engineers check new papers and run experiments day and night to gain new knowledge.

In the world of “education,” which deals with natural intelligence, this is not the case. A “teaching license” is no proof that a teacher is well versed in developmental theory. The people working on the front line of training natural intelligence are not well versed in developmental theory. We want to point out that this is a serious problem.

Teachers may have studied at university the theories of Piaget, Erikson, Vygotsky, Dewey, Comenius, Froebel, Gardner and others on which the current education system is based, but 99% of teachers are not well versed in theories of child development. They regard that as the domain of psychiatrists and counselors.

Most teachers’ minds are filled with daily chores and classroom management, and almost none of them carry on continuous research into child development or work day by day to improve children’s environments. In the world of the current education system, where having neither the time nor the mental room for this is the norm, the chance of the kind of nonlinear innovation seen in the AI world is close to zero.

Alternative education and developmental theory

In every era, what becomes mainstream starts out as something counter to the mainstream, and education too has several alternative methodologies. Polymath Research has investigated and studied most of them.

Our research finds that among alternative educational approaches, only two are based on a systematic developmental theory spanning birth through adolescence: Montessori education and Steiner education (Waldorf education). The other approaches do not derive from a systematic developmental theory, and because so much is left to the discretion of the practitioner, we judge that their educational theory cannot be tested in a reproducible way. (If you know of others, please let us know.)

Of these two, Steiner education views the stages of development in seven-year cycles: 0–7, 7–14 and 14–21. We judge, however, that the basis for this cannot be scientifically demonstrated. Some cite as its basis the claim that “all human cells are replaced every seven years,” but this is not scientifically accurate. The rate at which cells are replaced differs by cell type, and the cells are not all replaced on a fixed seven-year cycle. The human body has about 37 trillion cells¹, and each has a different life cycle.

Skin cells, for example, are replaced relatively quickly, renewing themselves in about two to three weeks. Red blood cells live about 120 days (four months), after which they are broken down in the body and new red blood cells are produced. The cells lining the intestine constantly need replacing and turn over in anywhere from a few days to about a week. Some neurons in the brain are thought to be hardly ever replaced in a lifetime. Heart muscle cells barely proliferate, so most of them stay the same throughout life.

For these reasons, we judged that Steiner’s developmental theory cannot be scientifically tested and abandoned further research on it. Montessori developmental theory, on the other hand, has clear sources and can be scientifically tested, so we adopted it as the basis of Polymath Research’s developmental theory and continue to research it today.

Which developmental theory is it based on?

As a general tendency, only those who have taken an AMI (Association Montessori Internationale) teacher training course, or who have studied Maria Montessori’s writings directly, emphasize the importance of the “four planes of development” in Montessori developmental theory.

The more we studied this developmental principle, the more we came to believe that the reason society’s problems surrounding development never get solved is that many people work in jobs involving children’s development without knowing, or without properly understanding, this principle.

An educational theory works because its developmental theory is physically correct. The current education system tends to be good at raising natural intelligence in the short term but poor at it in the long term. Most natural intelligences tend to stop learning once they stop going to school.

For example, while people are in school their rate of reading is close to 100%, but when they are no longer required to read, it falls to around 30% even in the top country². In Japan, it is 20%. If that is the share of people who read every day, then the current education system, judged by the standard of producing natural intelligences that keep learning throughout life, performs at 30% or less. On a test, that would be a failing grade.

Anyone who knows the explosive curiosity and spirit of inquiry of a newborn, or the independence and creativity of a young child, cannot help wondering whether the current education system rests on a developmental theory that is fundamentally wrong somewhere.

Children’s true needs and their environment

Children have no choice but to live in environments that adults have prepared. Children have no power to change the environment of home or school directly, so the adults who design those environments must understand children’s needs.

Children lack the ability to communicate their needs directly. Even once their language develops, “what do I really want?” is not something they can easily explain. Communicating one’s true needs is far harder than we think. What we truly want shows itself only when it becomes available, in the form of long absorption, deep satisfaction and a major change in daily habits.

For example, in “an age without the iPhone,” it is hard to imagine “yourself absorbed every day” in “the things the iPhone first made possible.” In the same way, “when there is no environment in which children can educate themselves,” it is hard to imagine in advance “what children will show us” in “the things that such an environment first makes possible.”

As a rule, living things develop through free interaction with their environment. If the environment fits the needs of the organism, it can flourish; if it does not, life becomes harsh. Humans raised under the control of others become unable to govern themselves. Birds in a zoo eventually lose the ability to fly, and on a boiling planet many living things go extinct. This is a law that applies to living things in general, humans included.

How one makes use of a given environment is up to each individual, but something is clearly wrong when the number of people and the amount of know-how devoted to solving developmental problems keeps growing while the number of people troubled by developmental problems grows in proportion. In general, wrong solutions based on a wrong understanding make a problem worse, and it seems to us that this dynamic is at work here.

The four planes of human development

The “four planes of development” in Montessori developmental theory is the idea that the twenty-four years from age zero to twenty-four consist of four developmental phases of six years each: 0–6, 6–12, 12–18 and 18–24. The table below organizes the characteristics of each plane in terms of “physical development,” “mental development” and “social development.” (The table can be scrolled horizontally.)

Each plane can be further divided into three-year periods, such as 0–3 and 3–6, but that is not relevant to our subject here, so we omit the explanation. What matters is recognizing that the concepts of “sensitive periods” and “normalization/deviation” in Montessori developmental theory are nothing more than milestones as one steps up through these four planes over twenty-four years. Taking the concepts of “sensitive periods” or “normalization/deviation” out on their own does not capture the flow of development as a whole.

Montessori trainers and others probably emphasize the importance of the “four planes of development” in order to prevent people from falling into local optimization. Developmental theory is not meant to be used as a convenient excuse, as in “as long as we raise them in a good environment from 0 to 6, that will do for now.” It is meant for designing growth environments that are optimal for the individual’s life as a whole, and optimal for the universe to which the individual belongs.

Leaving aside those who do not understand the importance of the environment in which children spend their time, we believe the difficulty of actually “creating better environments for growth” comes from the fact that everyone’s “ideal environment” is different. This is caused by a vague definition of “a better environment for growth” and a low-resolution understanding of children’s developmental needs.

So if we understand the developmental needs that change over time, as shown in the table, “creating better environments for growth” should become a much easier game. These needs are something like an ecological characteristic of humans: they are reproducible in every individual, and the effectiveness of an environment can be scientifically tested. This sets it clearly apart from “environmental improvement” that never goes beyond someone’s assumptions, such as “children like these kinds of toys and picture books, so let’s put some out.”

Research into developmental theory leads to helping all life

Development is a manifestation of “recapitulating phylogeny,” the developmental principle common to all life, which continues unbroken from fertilization through the period in the mother’s womb (or, for egg-laying animals, the period inside the egg), that is, from before the first cry.

Humans evolved from single-celled organisms → multicellular organisms → eukaryotes → deuterostomes → chordates → vertebrates → fish → amphibians → amniotes → synapsids → mammals → Purgatorius → omomyids → Aegyptopithecus → Proconsul → apes → australopithecines → archaic humans (Homo erectus) → modern humans (Homo sapiens)³. That process is repeated in individual development as well.

The same developmental principle is at work in the trees and grasses that branched off from the eukaryotes and evolved through green algae into land plants, in the insects that branched off from the eukaryotes and evolved through protostomes and arthropods into insects, and in the birds that branched off from the amphibians and evolved through reptiles into birds.

We will not point out the detailed correspondence between ontogeny and phylogeny here, but to take one example, mammals have a reason why they must nurse. There are traits that cannot be acquired without nursing, and that bottleneck connects to the parts of an individual that cannot develop soundly. We have also discovered that unless that bottleneck is resolved, it hinders a complete transition to the next stage of development.

What we infer from this discovery is that an individual who missed a “sensitive period,” that is, an individual whose developmental need went unmet, keeps watching for a chance to meet that need from then on. But the program of development, which advances toward the universe, does not stop, so the individual develops by a detour, cultivating particular abilities that seem useful for reaching the universe. This is “specialization.”

For example, even when a child was not blessed with an environment that trains the five senses, they will try to sharpen their powers of reasoning by developing mathematical ability. If retaining memories is hard, they will try to explore by being highly active. If light cannot be used, they will try to heighten their sensitivity to sound. All of this is in order to understand this vast universe. A mysterious program of life is at work, one that strives to be cosmic to the very end.

The mind exists to understand the universe. Once a developmental need is met, preparation for the next phase is complete, and development advances asynchronously. If developmental needs are not met, the developmental stage does not advance even as the body grows and physically ages. Each individual organism understands the universe at a different stage, but the human species has acquired the art of raising the average level of understanding of the universe asynchronously, by leaving records in the symbols of writing and passing them on to one another. Because of this, even if individuals do not advance through the developmental stages, the species can live out its life without going extinct.

One year of physical development and twenty-four years of mental development

The physical recapitulation of phylogeny is largely accomplished in the first year of life. Having come ashore from the sea of the mother’s womb, the newborn starts with a cycle of nursing and sleeping, then flails its arms and legs, responds to sound and light, babbles, holds up its head, recognizes its mother, grasps objects, laughs out loud, rolls over, becomes shy of strangers, crawls along the ground, cuts teeth, sits, walks on all fours, gradually stands upright and makes the transition to walking on two legs.

The mental recapitulation of phylogeny is designed to be accomplished in the first twenty-four years of life. Just as starting to walk upright on two legs gives the freedom to move physically, fully meeting the developmental needs of those twenty-four years leads to the acquisition of a Cosmic Perspective⁴. Acquiring a Cosmic Perspective and gaining the freedom to move mentally is what humans, as mental beings, ultimately achieve. Whether this is called “attaining enlightenment,” “the fulfillment of the Original Vow,” “receiving a divine revelation” or “spiritual awakening” is up to each religion and sect, but all of them describe the state of “becoming one with the universe”⁵. In other words, it means becoming able to act on the basis of a cosmic self-awareness⁶. Acquiring that perspective enables one to contribute to the universe through work that lowers its entropy. This precise sequence of developmental stages, which might be called the human developmental clock, is common to all humans.

Polymath Research is still investigating the correspondence between ontogeny and phylogeny, but our findings so far have already yielded many insights. The surprising results are still under close examination and have not been published, but we thought that we should perhaps share the insights with society first, so we are publishing them here on our blog as an essay. We hope it offers some hints toward solutions for people struggling with problems related to development.

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Footnotes

1. “Many people may have learned that the human body has about 60 trillion cells. But the basis for that number was vague, and it was in fact not a reliable figure. Then, finally, a paper by Eva Bianconi and colleagues published in November 2013 estimated the number of cells in the human body at about 37 trillion.” Quoted from Checking Numbers of Interest! No. 9: “37,000,000,000,000 (37 trillion)” (in Japanese). ↩

2. From GfK Japan’s “Global Survey on Reading Frequency” (conducted in 17 countries in 2017). ↩

3. Naturally, there are various theories. There are “not enough fossils” to say anything definitive, but even if future research rewrites this history, the broad direction in which it is heading will not change. ↩

4. This is Polymath Research’s own interpretation, drawn from our research into developmental theory, and is not part of Maria Montessori’s original theory. ↩

5. Polymath Research regards the theories of Maria Montessori and Buckminster Fuller, along with the teachings of various religions and sects, as “the wisdom that all of humanity has acquired to date by working together,” and pursues its research into developmental theory spherically. When their many signals are viewed topologically, it becomes clear that the many teachings that arose asynchronously across the earth and were handed down share common elements, much like physical laws. ↩

6. If, in the 6–12 phase, a child could not carry out sufficient inquiry within a framework centered on the universe, they come to act on the basis of a self-awareness rooted not in the universe but in human society. In other words, they come to think in a human-centered rather than a universe-centered way. By Polymath Research’s standards, the “Cosmic Education” of Montessori education is not truly cosmic, and we see a great deal of room for improvement in it. ↩